That's why it's often critical to implement systems to second-check important stuff.
If I may lapse into garrulous-old-fart mode: Soon after I made partner in my BigLaw IP firm, as the resident software(-adjacent) geek I was tasked by the management committee with overseeing the firm's docketing operation: Six very nice people (ladies of varying ages, as it happened) who for many years had opened all our incoming mail from courts, agencies, etc., and logged future deadlines into our by-then antiquated, home-grown, pre-PC calendaring system, still running on a mini-computer.
The proximate cause of my tasking was that the other partners were getting increasingly frustrated by the human-origin calendaring errors that kept showing up in lawyers' tractor-feed greenbar printouts. If we'd blown a court deadline, we likely would have gotten zero sympathy from the court, the client, and our malpractice-insurance carrier.
The first thing I did was implement a Navy-nuke system in which every deadline entry got second-checked. That produced some grumbling among the docketing staff because it made extra work for them.
(We mitigated that by eliminating some calendaring tasks that no longer made sense, such as logging every date, in ink, into a bound ledger book, which no one had looked at in years — I called it our WORN drive: Write Once, Read Never.)
I reassured the staff that no one would get fired for making a mistake, because we all do that. But they very well might get fired if their mistake got out the door because they'd bypassed the second-checking system.
Happily, the rate of calendaring errors showing up on lawyer greenbar printouts dropped to essentially zero. No one had to be fired, and several staff members said that they liked the second-checking system.
(Soon after, we switched to a then-modern, PC-based system.)
If I may lapse into garrulous-old-fart mode: Soon after I made partner in my BigLaw IP firm, as the resident software(-adjacent) geek I was tasked by the management committee with overseeing the firm's docketing operation: Six very nice people (ladies of varying ages, as it happened) who for many years had opened all our incoming mail from courts, agencies, etc., and logged future deadlines into our by-then antiquated, home-grown, pre-PC calendaring system, still running on a mini-computer.
The proximate cause of my tasking was that the other partners were getting increasingly frustrated by the human-origin calendaring errors that kept showing up in lawyers' tractor-feed greenbar printouts. If we'd blown a court deadline, we likely would have gotten zero sympathy from the court, the client, and our malpractice-insurance carrier.
The first thing I did was implement a Navy-nuke system in which every deadline entry got second-checked. That produced some grumbling among the docketing staff because it made extra work for them.
(We mitigated that by eliminating some calendaring tasks that no longer made sense, such as logging every date, in ink, into a bound ledger book, which no one had looked at in years — I called it our WORN drive: Write Once, Read Never.)
I reassured the staff that no one would get fired for making a mistake, because we all do that. But they very well might get fired if their mistake got out the door because they'd bypassed the second-checking system.
Happily, the rate of calendaring errors showing up on lawyer greenbar printouts dropped to essentially zero. No one had to be fired, and several staff members said that they liked the second-checking system.
(Soon after, we switched to a then-modern, PC-based system.)