Don’t take a piece of paper to a knife-fight

Negotiation Anatomy™ →Go uptown Walk-away | Escalation | Algorithm | Heuristic | subject matter expert | Operationalisation | Playbook | Smart contract | Dead horse | Knife fight | 7 wastes | Cruddy legal advice Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Negotiation Negotiation hacks Contract 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 the JC’s maxims. If you have a real business risk, then you need a real business control for it. Not a piece of paper that you signed in 2007 and then stuck in a drawer.

To be sure, you can support your operational controls — really make them sing — with a stout legal contract, but if you don’t have any practical operational controls, or if the fellow who is supposed to be monitoring them is asleep at the switch then the fact that, back in the day, credit had your docs unit engage in six months of hand-to-hand combat with your client to shove a NAV trigger in their ISDA — sticking anything in a document that no-one will ever read again, and most people in your organisation wouldn’t understand even if they did, is a really bad way of hedging against a real risk.

See also

• smart contracts