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 compete in a series of professional disciplines, the JC is pleased to announce some standardised criteria for judging panels to assess finalists for the inhouse legal team of the year award.
- Timeliness of brief: How reliably does your team sync to the magical 6pm deadline before dropping a “drafts required by open of business tomorrow” instruction on external advisors?
- Inexplicable delay: For how many weeks does your team leaves drafts — whose immediate turnaround it signalled was a matter of life and death, and to accommodate which, the external legal team rearranged long-standing plans for the theatre, wedding anniversaries and so on — before deigning to look at them?
- Can I speak to a partner please? How disdainful, on average, is the team to the junior 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 teams usual amendments to perfectly sound legal drafting? Additional points for refusing to hear of modifications to your own mangled syntax;
- 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!!!”