When I woke up yesterday, my $2.00 alarm clock told me it was February 29, 2012. There were lots of blog posts about Leap Day and how it affected court filings and whatnot, but I really just thought of it as just another day in the law firm biz… However, by the end of the day, I realized that it had one significant impact on my projects, and that one of those would need to be pushed back in March.

While trying to run a Litigant Strategic Profile from LexisNexis’ CourtLink system, we kept noticing that the reports simply wouldn’t run. We contacted Lexis in the morning to see what the issue was and they told us that they would investigate the issue and return our call as soon as they figured out what was causing it, or when they got it corrected. Morning turned to afternoon, and finally we heard back from them with a surprising answer. Turns out that the Litigant Strategic Profiles couldn’t understand February 29th, and therefore the reports simply wouldn’t run. The solution was to not run the reports until March 1st, when the system would be back to normal.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? My two-dollar alarm clock can handle leap day, and Lexis’s system cannot?? I thought the days of Y2K were twelve years in the past. Plus, it isn’t like this day just… pardon the pun… leaped out of no where. We all know that years divisible by four bring us Presidential Elections, the Summer Olympics, and Leap Day!!

We checked this morning and the system is back to normal. I asked around and did find that others had the problem, but where told it was a “systems” issue and not related to Leap Day. So, maybe the tech guy we talked to was wrong (or didn’t get the memo to Ix-nay on the Eapday-lay.) If it was a Leap Day issue, then Lexis has 1459 more days to look into this and make sure that it works in 2016. That will be a Monday, and I will expect everything to work!! If not, let me know the week before and I’ll schedule a three-day weekend.