Past, present and future

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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 I thought was interesting and has a bearing on legal practice: business management, complexity, systems theory, organisational sociology and so on. Much of this is in the form of summaries, book reviews and (often ham-fisted) longer essays in which I try to synthesize what I have learned from these books into something useful for modern life and career management. This material will also, for the time being, be on the free site.

(iii) Detailed Capital markets legal documentation content. Hyperlinked legal terms, Nutshell™ summaries, comparisons, summaries and in depth discussion and analysis of master trading documents. Also longer essays on market history, observations about how market dislocations and catastrophic events have unfolded, and how regulators and banking institutions have reacted to them. This material draws on 30 year “school of life” experience as a practising lawyer in the international financial markets. This will make up the bulk of the premium content.

Yes, it's contrarian

It shouldn't need to be said but, let’s say it: this is an information resource and not specific legal advice. Any reader uses it at her own risk. These opinions are personal, many of them are idiosyncratic, impatient, polemical and, surprise surprise, contrarian. Some of them are probably wrong.

This material is designed for people who are engaged in specialist negotiation and advisory capacities, who will already have a basic technical grounding in these disciplines. The JC frequently departs from conventional wisdom — sticks two fingers up at it — and I make no apologies for that.

That is one of the key values this material brings: a different perspective, to rough up complacency and challenge preconceptions even where they may be perfectly reasonable. The JC will often get things wrong. It isnot perfect. But neither, as the JC’s financial disasters roll of honour demonstrates, is anyone else. There are fakers, dilettantes, confidence players and bullshitters everywhere. The JC just admits it.

Think of the JC as a contribution to your cognitive diversity quotient.

How it will make things better

Paid subscriptions will help with technological improvements to the site and its content: better documentation of and a tidy-up to the coding to manage the technical back-end, which should make the whole thing more consistent. Depending on how much subscription we get we will commission some help to build out content, making the site more comprehensive. We have some far off, dreamy plans to create a customised offering for in-house teams, but that is a bit further off in the future.