The NDA my lawyer wrote had a typo that cost me 8k in legal fees

Signed an NDA back in March with a vendor in Austin. My lawyer used a template and mixed up the governing law section, wrote Delaware instead of Texas. When we had a dispute last month, their team used that to drag everything into a Delaware court. I had to hire local counsel there, fly out for one hearing, and now we're stuck with a 8k bill before we even talk settlement. My fault for not reading the whole thing line by line, but isn't the whole point of paying a lawyer that they catch this stuff? Has anyone else had a dumb clerical error in a contract totally change the cost of a deal?

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miles541mo ago

Did you actually read the whole contract before you signed it, or did you skim it like most people do? Lawyers write hundreds of these things a year, and templates are how they keep costs down. If they had to draft every single one from scratch, you'd be paying 8k just for them to read it back to you. The Delaware mistake is annoying, sure, but it's not like they hid it in fine print. You said yourself it was your fault for not catching it, so maybe the real lesson here is that a lawyer isn't a guardian angel, they're just a tool. Next time, spend the extra hour reading the whole thing before you put your name on it, and save yourself the 8k.

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jamieperez1mo ago

I read a piece in the Texas Law Review about how forum selection clauses are the most ignored part of any contract, so @miles54 is onto something about the reading thing, but man, 8k is a steep price for a typo lesson.

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