Negotiation Anatomy™

Tell me more
Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

One of those good, well-tempered folk of the documentation unit whose task, though not Herculean in any aspect bar its tedium, is stoutly resisting predictions that it will be automated by the end of the year — a prediction that legal and technology luminaries have been making regularly since 1995.

Do you want to know why, by the way?

Still, every character archetype has a weakness, and the Jolly Contrarian can reveal the innate flaw of every ISDA negotiator, and that is total cluelessness about paragraph formatting in Microsoft Word. They just cannot do it. Page breaks and multi-level automatic numbering are trying enough, but asking a negotiator to format a table of Documents for Delivery — and every manjack amongst them must do it — is a guaranteed disaster.

The collective noun for a group of negotiators — especially those attached to the same deal — is a “squabble”.

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 |