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Banks did not domesticate law firms. Law firms domesticated banks.” | Banks did not domesticate law firms. Law firms domesticated banks.” | ||
:—Noah Yuval Harari, ''Legio Cadabra: A Brief History of The Magic Circle''}} | :—Noah Yuval Harari, ''Legio Cadabra: A Brief History of The Magic Circle''}} | ||
{{ | {{D|Law firm panellɔː fɜːm ˈpænᵊl||n|}}Proof that, far from being a seething pit of apex predation, the financial services industry is no more than an [[extended phenotype]] — a gruesome, metastasised [[spandrel]] illuminating the space between adjacent domes of legal excellence — that exists for the pleasure and enrichment of those saintly white-shoed attorneys who grace the serene frescoes overhead. | ||
But | {{drop|T|he image of investment}} banks as docile, harnessed sauropods, munching stupidly away in the unwitting service of a higher caste of pan-dimensional superbeings seems far-fetched. But so does the idea of wheat bending the staggering intellect of humankind towards its merest biological ends, but that is what evolutionists would have us believe.<ref>others are still offering odds that thus is a deterministic crock, but that is another story.</ref> | ||
Could these masters of the universe really be so feckless as to be in the thrall of [[legal eagles]]? | |||
Do not dismiss it out of hand. Banking is riven with contradiction. That such devoted apostles of laissez-faire should instinctively organise themselves into Marxist dictatorships should tell us something is not right. | |||
The law firm panel, we submit, is another. | The law firm panel, we submit, is another. | ||
What looks like a case of the apex predator taming, husbanding and cultivating a subordinate species for their own ends: penning them in, fattening them a bit — in any case maximising their yield, wringing from the marrow of their tired bones a concentrated extract of value out of all proportion to their cost of carry — is nothing of the kind. | |||
It seemed that way for wheat, too. Only no-one, as far as JC knows, ever hired the wheat to run the wheat harvesting operation. | |||
Yet this is just what corporations have done. These are enterprises who, thirty years ago, barely ''had'' a legal department. Our [[history of in-house legal]] refers. What started out as a guy in a cardigan filling [[slavenburg]]s and authorising powers of attorney grew like topsy. What was one became five became, by the financial crisis, five hundred. Legal departments, conceived as a means of exercising operational control, began needing it themselves. In-house departments began acting like a fifth column for the law firms they were meant to be managing. | |||
Every now and then an upstart banker asks an impertinent question: | |||
{{Quote| | |||
{{drop|“W|}}e have a legal department numbering twelve hundred. That is about the size of Herbert Smith. All told it costs us half a billion. Yet we are still blowing ten figures a year on external legal firms. Can someone explain this to me?”}} | |||
The | The “law firm panel” arrangement springs from an observation — investment banks spend an awful lot of money of legal fees — coupled with that unavoidable trope of modern commerce: ''scale is everything''. | ||
Picture the scene: an enterprising fellow in the [[Legal operations|legal COO]] team has pulled 5 years’ of legal spend, totalled it, and used the AVERAGE function in | Picture the scene: an enterprising fellow in the [[Legal operations|legal COO]] team has pulled 5 years’ of legal spend, totalled it, and used the AVERAGE function in Ex. cel. It generates this no-brainer: | ||
{{Quote| | {{Quote| |