I think the solicitor complains too much. They have made a serious error and they should be the one facing consequences for their actions.
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If we were in the past and the solicitor filled out all the forms by hand, signing, initialing, all the appropriate spots, mailing it off, getting confirmation forms, signing all those, would they be blamed any less?
This is no more a computer error than the above example would be a biro error.
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The mind reels at the number of really dire judgements available based on this theory of consent. If anything, granting a robo-divorce too readily is probably the least-worst family law example; and only mid-tier in terms of sticking clients of assorted professional services types with the consequences of their lawyer’s, financial planner’s, broker’s, etc. mistakes.
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From a human-factors perspective it’s (almost) always both; barring particularly dramatic examples of programs that fail unpredictably even when operated perfectly or programs (like text editors) that neither provide nor promise any guidance to the user and perform exactly as they instructed.
The human is always the proximate cause of the fuckup; but the design of the system and the process is what determines whether it makes making mistakes particularly easy and common, whether it doesn’t specially facilitate mistakes but fails to intercept even common and predictable ones, or whether it’s quite resilient and requires you to fuck it up above and beyond the call of duty for the system as a whole to fail.
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I heard things like that only happened in Brazil.
If only there were some sort of oversight. Perhaps by a human capable applying some sort of judgement.
It’s the same sort of stupid with the “strict constitutionalists”.
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Fictional? Excuse me for having made my comment before others established further facts of this particular story, but I figured my comment was still relevant given the other story about the postal workers.
I’m honestly confused by the tone of your comment. Have I offended you?
ETA: after further thought, I think maybe you interpreted my comment to mean that Kafka would be upset about the movie Brazil. That wasn’t what I meant to suggest. I meant he would be disappointed that modern bureaucracies are not much improved from his own time.
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Not all UX patterns are dark: some are just gray.
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A fruitful way to satisfy this distinction might be to regard computer, human and institution as entwined in the user experience. A user error is facilitated by a computer’s design then made irreparable by institutions. “System says no” is maybe a better way of putting it than “computer says no”—a term that comes from a misanthropic comedy show.
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The court probably could physically, but apparently not legally. The judge was saying that the court could ungrant (I just made that word up) the divorce had the court made the error. But they didn’t. The error was all on the attorneys, according to this judge. Maybe the judge is wrong, I don’t know. Maybe the UI design is shit, I don’t know. But it’s still not accurate to describe this story as one of a computer making a decision that a judge is then unwilling to change. That’s just not what happened.
I don’t think this could happen in the US because we don’t have an automated process for granting divorce. We have no fault divorce but that still requires a judge to manually grant a petition. Perhaps allowing an automated process is the fatal flaw here? I can see a nonzero number of “oopses” with any automated system. Maybe they need an undo button?
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No. The courts cannot second guess when a solicitor retained by a client is doing what the client wants or not. That is not their job. If they fail at that through fraud or incompetence there are redresses.
The submission by the solicitor was wrong. It is their error and the courts do not challenge a solicitor when they plead on behalf of their client “do they really want that?” When they have no reason to doubt it. I doubt it’s legally plausible for the judge to retroactively say it never happened, there are such procedures in British law but they typically involve a court order from a higher court.
As @danimagoo says this story is not framed in a way that reflects the operation of law and procedure.
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Prequel? or just Brazil? 
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It’s reported that the heart of the problem is a law requiring courts to assume that computers are always right
That is not what this is about.
The solicitors realised their mistake two days later and applied to the high court to rescind the final divorce order. They described the error as being simply that of someone at Vardags “clicking the wrong button” and argued that as the final order was applied for by mistake, it should be set aside.
But McFarlane rejected the application and said: “There is a strong public policy interest in respecting the certainty and finality that flows from a final divorce order and maintaining the status quo that it has established.”
He added that it was necessary to correct the impression that the online divorce portal would “deliver a final order of divorce where one was not wanted simply by ‘the click of a wrong button’”.
“Like many similar online processes, an operator may only get to the final screen where the final click of the mouse is made after travelling through a series of earlier screens,” he said.
(Probably - hopefully - been ninja’d on this already.)
ETA - I see I have been, comprehensively. Coke’s all round! 
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Did he actually make the “we must double down on a highly visible and equally correctable error of the process to ensure public confidence in the process” argument? That’s basically as perverse as it gets.
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The underlying point is that if the court reverses this entirely legitimate outcome of a process undertaken by the client’s appointed lawyers, there is a risk that anyone else in future could claim “it was all a mistake, please reverse it” (I simplify but that’s the essence.)
(And for avoidance of doubt, I’m not making that point, the court is.)
So, yes, really, I guess.
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That seems like it would be a much stronger argument in the context of a proceeding that is adversarial in some way; or otherwise has stakes:
If you can just have your lawyer e-file a divorce with the court and have it approved as a formality there isn’t any obvious downside to your lawyer being able to say “Sorry, actually I fucked up that last filing; could you please reverse the formality?”(unless it’s around tax season; in which case HM Revenue and Customs should probably sniff around); at least so long as it remains sufficiently embarrassing, and requires discovery on sufficiently short time horizons, that ‘mistakes’ don’t become the de-facto cover for changing your mind in the medium to long term.
If it were something like witness statements, where there’s a clear and obvious risk to having those be too flexible, both because the incentives for intimidation are clear and because it’s nontrivial to re-run a trial, minus that one statement; I could see the lofty public-policy argument(though, by the same token, the greater gravity of something like a criminal trial would make the “we have to cling fast to the wrong answers; lest confidence be dented!” even more ghoulish); but it just seems weird for anything where the court will just rubber-stamp whatever your counsel brings in.
If you haven’t finished agreeing on the terms of the separation and then presto-chango now you’re divorced, there could be serious issues at play-like custody arrangements and financial stuff. Not a good situation.
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As I understand it there are potentially some financial issues/risks, mostly to do with perhaps losing out on a windfall if one of the spouses dies before the divorce is finalised, i.e death benefits for a spouse under a pension plan or similar and also situations where transferring assets is only possible to a spouse or where there’s a tax exemption for transfers to a spouse.
Those would be the solicitors’ problem and in the UK lawyers are required to have professional indemnity insurance and there is a central fund maintained by the professional body to cover situations where there is no such insurance for some reason (i.e. rogue lawyer or insurer goes bust).
Child custody issues are more or less entirely separate from divorce proceedings in the UK. They’d usually be dealt with at the same time obviously but having a divorce finalised doesn’t prevent dealing with custody issues.
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