Biggs constant

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The Biggs constant (also known as the “Biggs threshold”, the “Biggs minimum”, and the “Biggs point” after British financial naturalist John Meriwether Fortescue “Jack” Biggs) is the point at which incremental legal mark-up can not make less of a difference to the juridical content of a passage without making no difference at all. It is point just before which the last guttering flicker of plausible contribution to the forward momentum of the transaction is snuffed into a curlicue of waxen smoke; when the tiny pale blue dot of one’s personal justification for bothering to show up is finally subsumed utterly into the awesome grandeur of the negotiational cosmos.

A legal mark-up that reaches the Biggs threshold exactly, but does not exceed it for meaningfulness, is called a “Biggs hoson”. It is a very unstable markup.

Any Legal markup can be situated somewhere on a “utility continuum”, between the deal-killing blockbuster, whereby a legal eagle saves her client from certain ruin, at one end, and guileless frippery, by dint of which she scrapes over her billable threshold for the month, 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, 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 his diligent counsel — yours truly — to remove the bold formatting from a full stop. This he communicated, also by fax, at 2:35 in the morning. In the kind of irony that accompanies so many of the world’s most momentous occasions, it turned out upon inspection that the full stop wasn’t bold in the first place, but was a printed artefact from the low resolution of the fax.

See also

• The Fish principle