Past, present and future

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

The JC has been running in one form or another now for nearly fifteen years. It started out as one dude — me — trying to understand the ISDA Master Agreement and then put it somewhere where he wouldn’t lose it. The open source MediaWiki platform — the same one Wikipedia runs on — turned out to be a brilliant way of maintaining and building knowhow. Creating and then linking and cross referencing-material, in a sort of holistic and non-linear way, is really easy. Being basically lazy — a characteristic I maintain is a paragon virtue — and of chronically short attention span, this suited me perfectly. You can quickly create articles, save them down, and add to them later. If you never do, it can’t have been that important. This is content creation by a kind of alluvial process: small, inconsequential additions silt up over time.

So I started silting away. Before long, the JC had fully summarised and analysed anatomies of both editions of the ISDA, and other definitions booklets, master agreements, and legal resources followed. Some remained embryonic, some got deleted, some grew. Coverage has always been idiosyncratic, following my prevailing practice specialisation (you will observe: ISDA, commodities, equities, equity derivatives, prime brokerage, emissions, structured notes, repackaging, credit derivatives, in that order). My focus has always been analysing, explaining, simplifying, demystifying and contextualising — the commercial context possibly the most important of all since that is the one most often lost on newcomers (and, frankly, old hands) in these highly specialised products.

The tone is idiosyncratic and decidedly “non-corporate”, and will stay that way. From the start, creating the JC had to be not just easy, but fun to write: there was no way I could ever have stuck at anything for so long if it was a drag. And Lord only knows, there is much that is absurd about our modern corporate life and the people who populate the landscape of the financial markets.

All of this, along with a day-job. The JC has largely been how I have managed to do a day job since I started it — lawyers gravely undervalue knowledge management, even though, obviously, it should be the most important thing they do — but nevertheless I owe a debt of gratitude to a sequence of employers over the last decade and a half for letting me carry on with it. They know who they are.

Introducing a paid tier will improve the site: it will provide some resources to manage the technical back-end and tidy up some of the ad-hoc coding that it currently relies upon, which should make the whole thing more consistent, and may — depending on how many subscribers we get! — bring some help to build out content, making the site more comprehensive.