Earlier quoted context omitted.
I attribute user error and stupidity when most people attribute malicious intent. 99% of the time, I am correct. I'm betting that, if the lawyer was not acting maliciously , s/he used the wrong version of the document to accept changes.
Fair point. On the other hand, I'm not much more inclined to work with a stupid lawyer than a malicious one. If he opens by screwing up this badly, what's he going to do next? There are some cases in which granting the benefit of the doubt is too much of a risk to be worth taking.
With a sufficiently big organization, it's common for some sort of higher precedence, non-negotiable appendix to render most of this stuff moot anyway. Corporate attorneys on the sell-side, even at surprisingly big companies frequently screw this up, often when making snide comments through the salespeople.
My buddy tells a story from when he was an SE many years ago and his company's attorneys were going to kill a deal over an NDA requirement. The customer ended up getting them to agree to "blah blah blah, subject to applicable law". One problem: the customer was a city, subject to freedom of information law in that state!
Experienced salespeople usually get it but eye-roll, as they have an incentive to STFU.