The human touch

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for some time we have wondered whether we should try to make an honest resource of the various master agreement anatomy on the JC. All this time spent lampooning ISDA’s crack drafting squad™ and the the the perverse, abstruse and obtuse behaviour of those engaged in in the process of creating and finalising master agreements just doesn't quite strike the right corporate tone.

If only, some speculate, you would settle down, grow up, stop making cheap cracks at American lawyers and get on with explaining the details of these documents, you could make this a really valuable resource. People might even pay for it.

Oh, and finish it for God’s sake.

We have for a while being quite swayed by these arguments and gave some thoughts to doing exactly that, but have decided not to, for the following reasons.

Firstly and most importantly it takes all the fun out of it. When the JC started this resource a decade or so ago, it was designed as (and it remains) a private notebook for jotting down and remembering how how difficult bits of complicated contracts work. To be bothered to continue doing that, you have to enjoy doing it. It is, readers, quite hard to enjoy the ’Squad’s Indemnifiable Taxes provision for its intellectual clarity and literary elegance. It’s easy, on the other hand, to have fun making fun of the quintuple negative