That lost courier box during a shareholder suit still gives me chills

Thinking back to my first years in this field, everything was paper based. We had to ship boxes of documents for every motion, and one time a courier straight up lost a critical delivery. It was for a major shareholder lawsuit, and the hearing was in two days. We panicked, calling every depot and hoping it turned up somewhere. Ended up pulling an all nighter to reproduce everything from our backups. Now with digital filing, that kind of disaster is pretty much impossible. It's crazy how a simple tech shift removed so much risk, lmao.

3 comments

3 Comments

aaronn573mo ago

Totally disagree that digital is safer. That box getting lost was a one off thing, but digital systems fail all the time in new ways. Look at what alex_murphy41 said about server crashes. Paper copies can't get corrupted by a software bug or wiped out in a ransomware attack. You could have multiple paper copies in different places. Now if the one cloud service goes down or gets hacked, everything is gone at once. The risk is way more concentrated now.

alex_murphy413mo ago

Yeah that part about pulling an all nighter to redo everything is brutal. I read a news piece a while back about a law firm that had a server crash right before a big trial, and they lost some digital files too because their backup system failed. So even now, the risk isn't totally zero, it's just different. But it's way better than a box of papers vanishing off a truck somewhere, lol.

daniel5112mo ago

The law firm story is a classic case of bad backup setup, not a digital problem. If they'd followed the basic 3-2-1 rule, that crash wouldn't have mattered. Aaronn57 has a point about concentration risk, but that's why you never rely on just one cloud service. You keep local copies too, just like having paper in different places. The real issue is people treating digital as magic and skipping the boring backup steps that actually make it safe.