Schwarzschild radius of document comprehension

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A negotiation’s “event horizon” is the threshold beyond which, through serial “clarifications” from disparate lawyers, para-legals, negotiators and documentation specialists, the legal contract passes irreversibly into a heat death of pure ennui. An Earth-bound lawyer crossing that threshold passes a point of no return: she will be unable to resist the fascination of trying to understand and even further “improve” the contract, will hold out hope of rescuing it from semantic oblivion, but will eventually be crushed utterly by the colossal forces of gravitational tedium, whence her only hope is to be regurgitated into a parallel universe as a transverse spume of pure cosmic energy (known in some markets as an exchange-traded derivatives specialist).

This came close to happening in September 2008 during the finalisation of the 2008 ISDA Master Agreement, a catastrophic spacio-legal dislocation of Euclidian space-time that almost destroyed global finance as we know it.

Not to be confused with the Schwarzschild radius of alcohol consumption, with which it bears superficial similarities. It is possible — in fact likely — for these two types of black hole to cohabit: semantic oblivion and alcoholic despair tend to orbit each other in a gruesome equilibrium. Should you happen to encounter the intersection of their Schwarzschild radii you will be trapped for eternity or torn bodily in two, unless you are a functional alcoholic tax lawyer, in which case you are probably inhabiting some paradox in the space-time continuum already.

The boredom heat death of the universe was only narrowly avoided during the implementation of the securities financing transaction regulations when a cartel of well-meaning industry associations and their respective legal working groups jointly produced a fifteen page, 5,000 word document explaining the concept of title transfer.

To this day, financial institutions around Europe have whole departments whose only function is to send SFTR disclosures to each other. Once a year, at Christmas, their email batteries fall silent and they meet atop the trenches for a game of football in No-Man’s Land.

See also

• Laws of worker entropy
• Schwarzschild radius of alcohol consumption
• Schwarzschild radius of institutional ennui
• Heat death