Template:Bold full stop: Difference between revisions
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) Created page with "A gentleman from the in-house team at Credit Suisse once marked up a pricing supplement, asking me to remove bold from a full stop, whic..." |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
All [[legal mark-up|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, a closer towards the fripperous, 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 where the thinnest atomic strand of value can be no further reduced — the [[Biggs Point]] was first isolated in 1997 when, by deliberate design or happy accident, a gentleman from the [[Inhouse legal team of the year|in-house team]] at a leading purveyor of institutional financial services found it while marking up a pricing supplement he had received by [[fax]]. Despite the Byzantine complexity of the document his only comment was a direction 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 but was an artefact from the low resolution of the [[Facsimile|fax machine]]'''.''' | |||
Revision as of 11:05, 9 November 2020
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, a closer towards the fripperous, 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 where the thinnest atomic strand of value can be no further reduced — the Biggs Point was first isolated in 1997 when, by deliberate design or happy accident, a gentleman from the in-house team at a leading purveyor of institutional financial services found it while marking up a pricing supplement he had received by fax. Despite the Byzantine complexity of the document his only comment was a direction 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 but was an artefact from the low resolution of the fax machine.