I first became interested in automation of some parts of writing when I had to build tables of authorities for appellate briefs, a couple of decades ago. My first attempt at automating that part was nearly disastrous, and taught me two lessons.
The writing and polishing went well enough, after I learned what tags to apply to citations. When I was finally happy with the brief's body, I started the steps to create the ToA. When it showed the document's name already filled in for the target, I thought the program was being helpful. It wasn't. It was being dangerous. Like Ourobouros, the snake swallowing itself, the program promptly blanked the document of that name to give itself a blank slate into which to write the ToA, then looked to my named source document to pull authorities from it, found no authorities (indeed, no text at all) there anymore, and created an empty table of authorities from the now-empty document. Oops.
First lesson: learn what you can about how a program works; don't make assumptions. I assumed that the program would pre-pend the ToA to the brief. The program's designers were thinking "specify different source and target names," but didn't warn users when the names were the same.
Second lesson: always have a back-up. It took 24 hours to get the IT folks to run the back-up tapes. (It had taken two weeks of research, writing, re-writing, editing, and polishing, to get to the point where it was zapped.)
Bonus lesson: don't push filing deadlines. Luckily, I had a few days left before the brief was due. (I'm a big believer in the "put it in a drawer, try to read it as cold as possible" rule -- not possible with blogs, of course.) So I could wait for the file to be restored, and still get it to the printer to file in time. (Yes, we still used printing companies then.) The temptation with e-filing will be to make one's internal deadline five minutes before the e-filing deadline. Just remember, they haven't repealed Murphy's Law.
Comments