IF YOU DROP THE BALL

In the 1980's there was a television series in the United Kingdom called 'Some Mothers Do Have Them' with a central character called Frank Spencer. This fellow was a disaster waiting to happen and was always falling into the most unbelievable situations to the eternal worry and shock of his wife Betty and laughter of the viewers at home. If there was a hole he would fall into it, if Betty sent him to the store he would set it on fire and he usually managed to come out unharmed. And where he tried to solve a problem he usually made it worse like once where he accidentally injected his dentist with a paralysing agent rendering him incapable of operating and then went on to try to pass himself off as the dentist to the patient who was already unconscious on the operating table.

In the real world, the response of some law firms and clients to errors is usually not laughter. The law firm may try the usual responses of denial, shifting blame to the client, a cover-up and finally a sullen apology when all else has proved unproductive. This is because such law firms see mistakes as negative things without any redeeming feature, a kind of total loss lacking any positive points whatsoever.
An alternative exists; in the words of a General Counsel we are familiar with who is responsible for assigning work to external counsel, 'the partner that was responsible for our relationship came to me and informed me of a mistake her firm had made in handling a particular piece of business they were working on for us. It's something we may not have noticed for a long time, if at all, but she came up and told us as soon as they found out about it. I trust her more now because I know that if they drop the ball they will not hesitate to let us know.
Jack Welch says that most business people play by the rules of the game and if you don't have integrity in your bones you should not be allowed on the field.
Since we live in an age of spin with an idle and hungry media eager to sell newspapers, being forthcoming can lead to horrendous media debacles hence the itch to hide which leads to worse debacles.
The choice for your law firm is that you can use the rap on the knuckles clients may give you to own the mistake to boost your resolve to do better or you can dissemble.