Football team
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The back page of a prospectus, which lists all the participants of the deal, their advisors, friends and relations, laid out in a hopscotch format that looks a little — not a lot — like a 4-4-2-1 football team formation, hence the witty name. Checking the firm’s name is correctly punctuated in the football team be a life’s work for a certain kind of denizen of the inhouse legal team. We call such a rare bird a “red-herring ninja”.
Beyond even the ISDA ninja, the tax ninja or the Stock loan ninja this fellow is the purest form of inhouse counsel, he has worked for your DCM team since 1995 and his sole ability — and we should not besmirch it, for it has served him well — is to hover around the Biggs threshold of minimal legal significance, bad-temperedly correcting the typography and punctuation of his employer’s legal name — “comma London Branch and not acting through its London Branch, if you please” — wherever he finds it on the football team of his deal prospectuses.
Corporate rebrandings and regulatory mergers — Brexit means Brexit, redux — can be life-defining moments for such a fellow.