The brave men and women of the GCHQ, here to save the world.

Office anthropology™
Licence to die... in a ditch.
The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click to expand:
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Legal eagles have unique empowerment from the highest reaches of the great modernist machine.

Now, James Bond famously had a licence to kill, but — let’s face facts — there is only so much you can do with that. Once you have bumped off Scaramanga that’s really that.

Eagle Squad’s power is more of a torture of the living. Whereas others in the legal documentation flow — notably, the poor benighted negotiators who are, really, the brave footsoldiers of legal practice, however hotly the eaglery denies it — have meaningful commercial constraints on the perversity they can bring to their task: there are measurements of their performance, and abstrusity doesn’t count: their metrics, service level agreements, KPIs — the whole ornate smörgåsbord of modernist fripperies by which their overlords can impel them to carry on, propelling them to find solutions, make accommodations, engineer compromises and basically box on — the Eagle Squad member has no such constraint.

She can resist a sovereign immunity waiver from an industrial corporate having no particular association with any organ of state indefinitely, on principle, notwithstanding the fatuity of the request — indeed, because of the fatuity of the request! — with no second-guessing or cajoling from the cheap-seats.

This is ineffable legal stuff; the risks of compromise passeth all muggle comprehending, and that is that. Eagle Squad has not so much a licence to kill as a licence to die in a ditch.

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