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Comment by margalabargala | Hacker News Reader

What happened here is that one member of a couple wanted a divorce, and the other member's lawyers accidentally submitted that person for divorce rather than a different client.

So basically the judge's argument is "those were your lawyers, you paid for them to act on your behalf, so this action they took on your behalf is valid."

It's not a "computer error" except that the lawyer who screwed up happened to be using a computer while doing so. If this were 50 years ago, and the lawyer wrote the wrong client's name on a document, would we call it a "pen and paper error"?

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On the face of it there is this difference:

> In his summary, Judge McFarlane noted that "with its now customary speed", the system granted the order just 21 minutes later.

In the equivalent pen and paper situation, the solicitor would presumably have a significantly longer time period to discover and correct their error.

On the other hand, they really should have been familiar with the process.

> If this were 50 years ago, and the lawyer wrote the wrong client's name on a document, would we call it a "pen and paper error"?

No, they would call it a "clerical error" and reverse the ruling.

Here's an example of such a law in the US:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_60

Exactly my immediate reaction.

I divorced through this process.

There are multiple steps. You have to apply, papers have to be served, then (after a five month cooling off period) you get a preliminary order (what used to be called a decree nisi) then after another few weeks you have to apply to a final order (what used to be called a decree absolute). I stayed up so I could apply for the final order at midnight. It was done by the time I woke up late the following morning.

Financial and child arrangements are separate cases and you only need to go to court over those if there are disputes over those.

In this case they had gone through the whole process when one party's lawyer's accidentally applied for the last step - the final order. That party had authorised their lawyer to do it, so its fair enough that they are being held to what their lawyer did on their behalf. . IMO people should not even use lawyers for the divorce. They might be needed for the (separate) child arrangements and finance disputes, if (and only if) those are disputed. For the divorce itself. Just do it online.

> For the divorce itself. Just do it online.

This is the first I've heard of applying for a divorce online. It's certainly not an option here.

Florida does offer a 2-page, simplified, uncontested divorce option. Unfortunately our county wouldn't hear of it.

My wife and I submitted our completed 2 pages to the clerk. They presented us with a 50 page financial pack (at .50/page) that had to be completed in it's entirety, notarized and submitted for review (and accompanying fee).

The wife had $0 in assets (being homeless). I had about the same. And it didn't matter.

She has since disappeared. I heard she was in CO but that was last year.

The whole process in the UK has been hugely simplified by the combination of no fault divorce, and separating the ending of the marriage from the financial and child cases. That is what makes the online process work so easily.

It means if you do not have a lot of assets you can settle financial things between you informally, or you can make an agreement and ask the court to make it binding. We did not have much in the way of assets and I (the higher earner) was going to take care of the child I just gave her a some money when she moved out and we left it at that. NO case over who the child would live with either (as it was pretty obvious).

it can be called a computer error due to the bad computer interface design of the drop down menu

In the pen and paper times you could call it a "form design error" if the tick boxes were, for example, confusingly named "Yes, I don't want to divorce" and "no, I do" and someone misunderstood and ticked the wrong one

Depends entirely on the software. If it was confusing and poorly put together such that it was difficult or unclear whose name gets put where and so forth, then there's a case to be made (!) that the lawyer intended and expected the software to do one thing, when it actually did another.

Some things should require human control and agency involved at every step from conception to completion. Even if the software merely enabled such a mistake to be made, that means the software is interacting with a system that is not equipped to handle failure modes gracefully. It's half baked, and as seen, the system can have profound and lasting impact on people's lives. If the stakes are high, the diligence and care have to be escalated as well.

Marriage, divorce, bankruptcy, and other situations should be human only until we are entirely certain that programmatic access is not going to result in hiccups and disruptions.

If you do it yourself (I did) its a reasonably straightforward webapp, and you do not really need a lawyer (its no-fault, and the divorce is separate from financial and child arrangements cases). You just fill in some forms, then wait a few months and fill in another form.

The problem here is that when lawyers deal with it for you they can mix up different cases, but the problem is that if you authorise the lawyer to act for you (as in this case) you cannot then disclaim responsibility for what they did under that authority.

> If you do it yourself (I did) its a reasonably straightforward webapp

As far as I can tell, on online option doesn't exist in the US. It must be done in person at the courthouse.

     Q:Can you file for divorce online?

     A:Online divorce services cannot independently result in a legally recognized divorce

ref: https://www.lawdepot.com/contracts/divorce/?loc=US

> If it was confusing and poorly put together such that it was difficult or unclear whose name gets put where and so forth

No. Lawyer simply clicked the wrong name.

It is not computer error. It is lawyer error.

Yes; writing the wrong name on paper is certainly a "pen and paper error". The only difference is this has never implied it was the paper's fault. "Computer error" only implies bad software because it is so often due to bad software (though I have no insight if that applies in this case).

We would 100% call that a clerical error.

That's what the offending lawyers called it to the judge when asking that their mistake be reversed.

Yeah, describing this as "a computer error" seems pretty misleading. In this case the computer was just a transmission medium, not the source of the error. If they had written it with pen and paper or tapped the message over a telegraph, it would have had the same problem. If you wouldn't phrase it as "Wrong couple divorced after postal error" or "telegraph error" then it doesn't seem like it would make sense here. The computer is entirely irrelevant.

Edit: Thinking through my own analogy about the telegraph more, I suppose that if it had happened over telegraph and had been phrased as "telegraph error" that could mean either the telegraph operator or the telegraph itself were to blame. So maybe the "computer operator" being to blame makes it a more reasonable description that I first thought. Still feels like a suboptimal description though since there is so much room for ambiguity. Though, a "postal" error still doesn't make much sense, so I suppose one would need to gather data about whether the "computer" is thought of more like the "telegraph" or the "post" to most people.

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila."

— Mitch Ratcliffe

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