A senior partner at one of our law-firm clients keeps a twenty-four-inch Dell monitor from the mid-2010s on his desk. He has better options available. He does not use them. The Dell is where he reads, and where he reads is where our work either succeeds or fails. Every Clad report we ship is tested, quietly, against that monitor.
I mention this because it is the kind of thing that gets filed under "detail," and then under "nice to have," and then, eventually, under "not our problem." At Semperr it is none of those. The detail is not an ornament on top of the work. The detail is the work.
What people actually notice
Clients rarely comment on the part of a product that is correct. They comment on the thing that is not. The misaligned column. The date that is displayed in their timezone in one place and ours in another. The font that fell back to Times New Roman on their laptop because the custom face did not load. They do not mention these things because they are petty. They mention them because the product is how they experience our competence, and an inconsistency in the product reads as an inconsistency in us.
The short list
A non-exhaustive list of details we will hold up a Clad release to fix. In no particular order.
Dates. Every date is displayed in the client's local time zone by default, with a hover to see UTC. Every date that refers to a legal deadline shows the deadline's jurisdiction alongside it. No client has ever asked for this; every client has, at some point, been glad it was there.
Citations. A citation that does not resolve to the underlying source is not shipped. A citation whose source has changed since we indexed it is flagged, with the date of the change, in the document itself.
Rendering. Every report is tested on the kind of screen our clients actually use — often older, often with lower color depth, often with aggressive PDF converters in the middle. The report renders legibly in all of those conditions or it does not ship.
Print. Half our clients print. The printed version is not a degraded copy of the screen version; it is a first-class deliverable. Margins, page breaks, running headers, and footnotes are all designed for paper, because paper is where the brief is read in chambers.
The ninety-five percent problem
There is a phrase I have come to dislike: "pretty much right." In software, "pretty much right" is where the client loses confidence. A report that is ninety-five percent correct is not ninety-five percent useful; it is a report the client now has to second-guess, which means it is a report they have to redo, which means we have been paid to create work.
The missing five percent is almost always in the details. Not in the core logic, not in the architecture, not in the data model. In the timezone conversion, the rounding rule, the character that renders as a box on a particular font setting. The discipline of the firm is the discipline of those five percent.
A standing order
The standing order on the Clad team is simple: if you would not sign the document yourself, do not send it. If a detail would embarrass you when read aloud in a meeting, fix the detail before the meeting. If the thing looks nearly right, it is not yet right.
The partner with the old Dell does not know we test against his monitor. He just knows our reports are always legible. That is the point. The detail that has been handled is the detail the client never has to think about, and the accumulation of details that have been handled is, in the end, what we are selling.
— Jules