Structurer
A queer fish with an odd relationship with the legal department, from whom she almost certainly originated. Structurers, and legal structurers, are some kind of odd hybrid between Sales and Trading, hired onto the desk in the dog days of 2005 (when anyone actually did “structuring”) to salt away the fiddly details of a complex derivative trade that Trading can’t model and Sales has no hope of understanding, let alone giving the merest toss about.
Whether such a graduate structurer is a kind of übermensch who has overcome her basic nature to become something greater, or just a runt who has succumbed to his own mortal weakness, having proven unable to hack the rigours of unadulterated legal practice, is a matter of conjecture. Structurers tend to say the former; in-house lawyers the latter, though there is irony here in that private practice lawyers will say exactly the same thing about those who have gone in-house.
In any case structurers tend to obsess about legal details, to the exasperation of their legal colleagues whose job it actually is to obsess about this. when two factions in the same camp are trying to outdo each other in pedantry before the other side has even had a go, there is no hope that the document will be anything but a disaster.
This kind of internal arms race led to the CDO cubed.
There are fewer structurers around these days, and they’re a chastened lot.
See also
Dramatis personae: CEO | CFO | Client | Employees: Divers · Excuse pre-loaders · Survivors · Contractors · The Muppet Show | Middle management: COO · Consultant · MBA | Controllers: Financial reporting | Risk | Credit | Operations | IT | Legal: GC · Inhouse counsel · Docs unit · Litigator · Tax lawyer · US attorney Lawyer | Front office: Trading | Structuring | Sales |