Inhouse legal team of the year
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People Anatomy™
A spotter’s guide to the men and women of finance. 
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To bring some rigour to the annual Awards season, and short of some kind of centralised games whereby different legal teams gather together to duel, or compete in a series of professional disciplines — tedium endurance events and so on — the JC is pleased to announce some standardised criteria by which judging panels, who plainly have no clue otherwise — to assess finalists for inhouse legal team of the year awards.
Any experienced inhouse lawyer will tell you, the following are the core skills:
- Timeliness of brief: After an indolent day of inactivity, how reliably does the team sync to the magical 6pm deadline before dropping a “drafts required by open of business tomorrow so help me” instruction on their external advisors?
- Inexplicable delay: For how many weeks does the team leaves drafts — whose immediate turnaround, it said, was a matter of life and death, and to accommodate which, the external team rearranged long-standing plans for the theatre, to celebrate wedding anniversaries and so on — before deigning to look at them?
- Yes, but can I speak to a partner please? How disdainful, on average, is the team to the junior-most lawyer on the external team should she try to answer uninformed questions about a document he has just spent sixteen hours preparing?
- Red-herring ninjadom: How comprehensive is the team’s knowledge of the punctuation, typography, weight, leading and style of the firm’s legal name wherever it appears in a prospectus?
- Mark-up pedantry: Beyond the inherent pedantry of the red-herring ninja, how brazenly superficial are the team’s amendments to perfectly sound legal drafting? Additional points for:
- refusing to hear of modifications to proposed drafting notwithstanding its incomprehensibility;[1]
- extensive markups of closing agendas, bible tables of content and process agent appointment letters, especially relative to the deal documentation;
- Throw the associate under the bus: How shamelessly will the team blame the most junior member of outside counsel team — the same one whose name the team keeps forgetting and whose legal assurances count for nothing in the “can I speak to a partner please” category — for neglecting to prepare and circulate “critical legal documentation” that has, in fact, been in every inbox since 4.30 am on the Saturday morning immediately following the 6pm request for it?
- External law-firm management: How feverishly insistent is the team in requiring all external spend over £2,500 to go through a mandatory three-way bidding process?
- Panel discussions: Additional marks will be awarded for persistent participation in yet another “stimulating discussion about Phase 3 regulatory IM today!!!”
See also
References
- ↑ Any Legal markup can be situated somewhere on a “utility continuum”, between the deal-killing blockbuster, whereby a legal eagle saves her client from certain ruin, at one end, and guileless frippery, by dint of which she scrapes over her billable threshold for the month, at the other. The median point is, we need hardly say, nearer the fripperous end, but if you venture a few standard deviations past that, you approach an absolute theoretical minimum, beyond which the utility of any legal mark-up is utterly nil. That final, infinitesimal point, past which the thinnest atomic strand of half-hearted value can be no further reduced — the so-called “Biggs constant” — was first isolated in 1997 when, either by deliberate design or happy accident, a gentleman from the in-house team at a leading financial services institution found it while marking up a pricing supplement he had received by fax. From me. Despite the Byzantine complexity of the document, his only comment was a direction to his diligent counsel — yours truly — to remove the bold formatting from a full stop. This he communicated, also by fax, at 2:35 in the morning. In the kind of irony that accompanies so many of the world’s most momentous occasions, it turned out upon inspection that the full stop wasn’t bold in the first place, but was a printed artefact from the low resolution of the fax.