Template:Bold full stop

All Legal markup can be situated on a “utility continuum”, between deal-killing blockbusters whereby a legal eagle saves her client from certain ruin, at one end, and guileless frippery, at the other. The median point is, we need hardly say, nearer the fripperous end, but if you venture a few standard deviations past that, you approach an absolute theoretical minimum point, beyond which the utility of any legal mark-up is utterly nil. That final, infinitesimal point, past which the thinnest atomic strand of half-hearted value can be no further reduced — the so-called “Biggs constant” — was first isolated in 1997 when, either by deliberate design or happy accident, a gentleman from the in-house team at a leading financial services institution found it while marking up a pricing supplement he had received by fax. From me. Despite the Byzantine complexity of the document, his only comment was a direction to counsel to remove the bold formatting from a single full stop. This he communicated, also by fax, at 2 in the morning. In the kind of irony that accompanies so many of the world’s most momentous occasions, it turned out that the full stop wasn’t bold in the first place, but was a printed artefact from the low resolution of the fax machine.