Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Patent Law Blogs -> IPBiz

Patent Law

: IPBiz

Disasters with Word's "track changes"

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Further to an earlier post on IPBiz about Word's "Track Change" feature, IPBiz re-affirms that people, ESPECIALLY ATTORNEYS, need to be careful about using this feature.

One horror story is reproduced on the mathewingraw blog:

Some of you may have seen this already, since it has been passed around on Twitter, but I just had to point to Rick Segal?s hilarious blog post about a startup that did everything right in its business plan ? right up until it sent the document without clicking the ?accept changes? menu item in Word. So when Rick (who is a VC with J.L. Albright in Toronto) looked at the impressive business plan, what he saw in the margins were all the edits and comments made by the team and their advisors, including:

?Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.?

?When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them?

?I?d delete this section since we don?t have these features on the roadmap and haven?t figured out how to code this unless you believe the investors won?t catch this.?

?VCs are typically stupid when it comes to this section so be prepared for a dumb question blizzard.?

IPBiz wonders if the section VCs were stupid about concerned intellectual property (or underlying technology).

Full post as published by IPBiz on September 25, 2008 (boomark / email).