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 nut out the close out mechanics of 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, linking and cross-referencing material in a holistic and non-linear way is really easy on MediaWiki.

Being basically a lazy sod — a trait I maintain is a paragon virtue — with a chronically short attention span, this way of working suits me perfectly. You can quickly create articles, save them down, and fix them them later. You can edit while you are on the train, walking the dog, or being driven slowly up the wall by middle managers on the weekly regulatory change stakeholder check-point all-hands conference call. It is perfect for the frequently interrupted and the chronically wanting of an attention span. Anything you start now you can save down and come back to 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. It doesn’t need a grand plan. It’s forever provisional. Iterative. That suits the erratic, impulsive nature of modern practice. It certainly suits me.

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, which has meandered over the years (you will observe: ISDA, equities, equity derivatives, prime brokerage, emissions, exchange traded derivatives, structured notes, repackaging, credit derivatives and, along the way, a fair bit of regulatory stuff).

The focus has always been analysing, explaining, simplifying, demystifying and contextualising — the commercial context the most important of all since that is the aspect most often lost on newcomers (and, frankly, old hands) in these highly specialised products.

The tone is idiosyncratic and unashamedly non-corporate and it 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, with a day-job. Mind you, 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 it should be the most important thing they do. 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.

Paid tier

What you get

Broadly the JC splits down three ways:

(i) Basic waggishness for the sake of it — Toto chat, Otto Büchstein and Opco Boone nonsense. This has little value to anyone but me, and will stay free. If you enjoy it, great!

(ii) Substantive content about things I am not expert in, but which I’m learning and which has a bearing on legal practice: business management, complexity, systems theory, organisational sociology and so on. Much of this is in the form of book reviews, and (possibly hamfisted) longer essays attempting to synthesize what I have learned from these books. This material will also combine for the time being, remain free.

(iii) detailed Capital markets legal documentation content. Analysis of master trading documents, and historical observations about how market dislocations and catastrophic events have unfolded, and how regulators and banking institutions have historically reacted to them. This material draws on 30 years of “school of life” ¹experience as a practising lawyer in the international financial markets. This will make up the bulk of the premium content. It shouldn't need to be said but, let's say it: this is an information resource and not specific legal advice. These opinions are personal, many of them idiosyncratic and, surprised surprise, contrarian. some of them are deliberately provocative. This material is designed for people who are employed in specialist negotiation and advisory capacities, who will already have a basic technical grounding in these disciplines. I frequently depart from conventional wisdom — stick two fingers up to it — and make no apologies for doing so. This material has obvious value, even if only to challenge your preconceptions, and should be treated as such: it may be wrong. I'm not perfect. But neither, as the JC’s financial disasters roll of honor demonstrates, is anyone else. Think of the JC as a contribution to your cognitive diversity quotient.

How it will make things better

The paid tier will help me improve the site and add content: 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 — depending on how many subscribers we get! — bring in some help to build out content, making the site more comprehensive.