Legal
I am a human being
The department whose individuals you can’t be bothered naming to which you forward awkward queries you can't be bothered reading for yourself, let along taking the time to understand. You may never how much a lawyer resents that to-all email addressed: “Hi, Legal”[1].
Help, help, help, help, help me Legal
The frequently heard, and usually false, refrain “I cannot opine on that, because it’s a question of law” drops like a scented jewel fro the lips of that kind dreary colleague who can’t be bothered to — or is too scared to — make a judgement of her own because, well, no-one likes making decisions in a modern multinational. No good comes from taking a view.
But, dear colleague, however inconvenient it may be to the outlook for your posterior, not all legal questions are beyond your grasp. Indeed, by presumption of law, none of them are: you know their answers comprehensively, however paltry your legal education. Ignorance is no defence.
Yet it seems to be not so much a defence as an aspirational state of virtue within the confines of the modern corporation.
“Legal will need to say when the contract is formed. It is not for me to opine”. This is the sort of senseless thing you hear. “Legal” can opine, of course — nothing gives Legal greater pleasure than the opportunity to sound off on the difference between an offer and an invitation to treat, or to weigh in on the question of whether the intention to create legal relations is indeed an independent ingredient of the consensus ad idem[2]. But of course any fool should know if he has concluded a contract. Does he have such a crisis of confidence at the till in the supermarket, or as he presses his coppers into the newsagent’s mittened hand? Why should the fact that it is a security one is buying make the concept any harder? At any rate, take a view, if you want to clarify it, appeal for help: but it must be one thing or the other.
Refusing to answer any legal question however basic doesn’t save you from a forensic trap so much as it shrouds you in a self-inflicted no-man’s land of purblind ambiguity. For — and this is a matter of logic, not law — you either have a contract or you don’t: each status implies its own set of risks and rewards, but there is no purgatorial state between them. It’s like being pregnant. There is no third way. You have to hitch your wagon to one train or the other.
- ↑ There is something worse: faux joviality, which conveys as finely honed sarcasm, in the phrase “Hi, Legal Eagles!!!”
- ↑ Whatever the learned academics and the courts may say it is not. Intention to create legal relations is exactly the inference one draws from there being offer, acceptance and consideration.