It’s not about the bike

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Having been traumatised by compulsory inter-house cross-countries in his youth — best ever placing: sixth-last — the JC has always loathed races of any kind, resented those who are good at them, and revelled at any schadenfreude going should the foot-race winners of the world come a-cropper. Look, exercise is important, but it is something one should do alone, anonymously, under cover of darkness if possible, and in disguise if not. So it is somewhat galling to be repeating Lance Armstrong’s words, but here goes:

It’s not about the bike.

There are two ways to lose three hundred grams from your loaded frame weight: upgrade to kevlar forks and graphene spokes, at a cost of a few grand, or cut out all the pies.

So what has this got to do with legal design? Well, automating your existing process as it is, is like upgrading to kevlar forks instead of getting on the treadmill. Time for another down home JC-branded Latin Maxim, readers: primum comede minus: “First, cut out the pies.”

You will lose ten kilos and save money — on pies, right? — and your current bike will work a lot better. You might not need to use it so much. You might conclude that kevlar forks are a bit of a waste of money. Anything you automate is, necessarily, low value: because you make it low value by automating it.

Automating might give you a short term productivity bump, but you’ll rapidly bank it and, anyway, if you can automate a process, so can anyone else. And then there are the downstream costs. Not just the rent extracted by the software vendor, the internal bureaucratic overhead in maintaining, auditing, approving and renewing the software, training legal users, updating the content — the knock on pain of solving a problem which wasn’t, actually, that you needed Kevlar forks, but that you needed to go on a diet and get in shape.

And this is not to mention the problem of figuring out what to do if there’s a system accident.