J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Excel-Related Problem At Barclays

Excel made the news: Excel error leaves Barclays with more Lehman assets than it bargained for.

A reformatting error in an Excel spreadsheet has cropped up in the largest bankruptcy case in U.S. history, prompting a legal motion by Barclays Capital Inc. to amend its deal to buy some of the assets of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

The law firm representing Barclays filed the motion (download PDF) on Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, seeking to exclude 179 Lehman contracts that it said were mistakenly included in the asset purchase agreement. The firm - Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP - said in the motion that one of its first-year law associates had unknowingly added the contracts when reformatting a spreadsheet in Excel.

A few details:

According to the motion, Barclays sent the spreadsheet containing the list of contracts to Cleary Gottlieb at 7:48 p.m. EDT on Sept. 18. The spreadsheet - which contained almost 1,000 rows of data with a total of more than 24,000 individual cells - needed to be reformatted and converted into a PDF file so it could be posted on the bankruptcy court's Web site before midnight. At 11:37 p.m., Cleary Gottlieb sent the converted file to the court, the motion said.

However, contracts that had been marked as "hidden" in the spreadsheet when it was received by the law firm were added to the purchase offer during the reformatting process, according to the motion. Those contracts weren't supposed to be part of the deal; they also were marked with an "N" for "No" in the original version of the spreadsheet, Cleary Gottlieb said in the motion.

It would be interesting to know exactly what happened to this workbook. And it's unfortunate that the headline referred to it as an "Excel error."