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

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Negotiation Anatomy™

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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 practical 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 is not going to get you out of a jam if you find out, some years later, that said client blew through the NAV limits you carefully confected nine months ago.

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.

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