All our other counterparties have agreed this

From the annals of “great lies habitually told in polite society today”, “all our other counterparties have agreed this” can be put down next to “the cheque’s in the mail”; “your call is important to us”; “you were the first, honey”; “no, your bum doesn’t look big in that” and “I can make America great again” as preposterous canards that should be laughed out of court.

Yet this one, offered up with tedious regularity by buyside negotiators, persists, mostly because of the craven timidity of sell-side salespeople, who are prone to believe it. This is because, like rutting spaniels, they will believe say or do anything their client asks them to in spite of whatever evidence there may be under their noses that it is false.

This lie can, nevertheless, be quickly picked apart. This won’t win a lawyer any friends from a priapic salesman who sees sales credits evaporating before his very eyes, but one of the simple pleasures of advocacy is quietly ruining your clients base intentions.

Firstly say, Oh, well in that case you’ll be happy to send us a copy of the contract where our competition has given you that right, so we can see for ourselves.

Your cocky counterpart will immediately be silent, and may even adopt an attitude of petulant passive aggression. He may mumble something about client confidentiality, which you might teast apart by asking why he thought it appropriate, therefore, to tell you selected contents of the agreement.

for here is the thing: he's most likely to be bluffing, because he knows it isn't cricket to call his bluff. He may be right, but the concession may have been extracted at enormous cost on another issue. this is called horse trading, and it is quite common in - well - trading. He also may be a bit dim, and have been hoodwinked into thinking that his counterparty had granted him this special right, when in fact it had buried it in a schedule or a crafty double negative elsewhere in the documentation.