Molesworth self-adjusting thank-you letter
 There is nothing new under the sun, document assembly fans
|
When thought leader Darryll R. Mountain predicted[1] that document assembly would lay waste to the legal profession a few years ago, he can not have known how late to the party he was. For the forefather to this vision was the noble, fearless and brave nigel molesworth (cheers cheers), the curse of st. custards and, of course, one of the young (and, frankly, old) JC’s great heroes.
Modern applications
And here, in the new world, we find wondrous new applications. We even have a law firm, those collective sparrows of finance, Simmons + Simmons, who stumbled upon the idea but executed it so badly that, far from solving the problem of negotiating tedious contracts, they made it worse.[2] Let the legal starlings for ever be Alfred Russel Wallace to the JC’s Charlie Darwin.
Here's the idea. Take a common, but unstandardised contract, that legal eagles are in the habit of sending each other on the premise that it manages a risk that can, and really ought to, go without saying. In Simmons’ case it is the terms of business; let us take that iatrogenic staple the confidentiality agreement.
Let us say you are about to embark on a “project” with one of your clients. The project is simple, workaday, its purpose easily articulated, and it carries an appreciable, but containable, risk of harm — mainly embarrassment, if we are honest[3] — should information passing between the participants in pursuit of it be treated without care.
Your client’s legal department sends you a confidentiality agreement. The evolution of legal technology being what it is, you would expect this to be a standardised short form, addressing the four of five points a confi must, you can nod it through so you and your counterpart’s legal departments can be on your respective ways to get on with the far more pressing matters of legal risk which face us in these modern times.
It won’t be, of course: it will be a fantastical, paranoid, weaponsing tract. It will comprise seven pages of closely-typed 10 point text, which will purport to commit you to all kinds of exclusivities, indemnities, and open-ended covenants to mount legal defences to see off polite requests for regulators and the like.
This will oblige you to engage in close combat. You will have to sift through the text looking for buried innuendoes. You will mark it up and send it back, and settle in for a 2 two week pitched battle where you and your client’s legal shell each other with thrust and counterthrust.
See also
References
- ↑ Disrupting Conventional Law Firm Business Models using Document Assembly, International Journal of Law and Information Technology, Volume 15 (2007)
- ↑ See the Simmons TOBs offensive
- ↑ The notion that much of what passes between the legal departments of modern financial institutions is clever, much less proprietary or sensitive, is one of the great canards of our age.