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In this view, the in-house [[legal department]] — a bank function all but unknown thirty years ago, but now so monstrous that it needs its own chief operating officer<ref>our [[history of inhouse legal]] refers.</ref> — really only exists to make life as easy as possible for the law firms to optimise recovery of recorded chargeable time. | In this view, the in-house [[legal department]] — a bank function all but unknown thirty years ago, but now so monstrous that it needs its own chief operating officer<ref>our [[history of inhouse legal]] refers.</ref> — really only exists to make life as easy as possible for the law firms to optimise recovery of recorded chargeable time. | ||
[[Big law]]’s neat evolutionary trick big here is to weaponise the agency problem by imposing structural intermediation between those who ''instruct'' | [[Big law]]’s neat evolutionary trick big here is to ''weaponise'' the [[agency problem]]. It does this by imposing yet more structural intermediation. | ||
Corporations, represented by their staff (human agents) — appoint advisory banks (corporate agents), themselves represented by their staff (human agents), who appoint professional advisers (corporate agents),<ref>Once upon a time there was no corporate agency here and individual professional advisers had unlimited personal liability. Just imagine!</ref> themselves represented by their staff (human agents) — to advise on a transaction with another corporation, similarly represented. There arises therefore a delicate chain of agencies — six would be standard in the simplest bilateral transaction — between those who ''instruct'' the firms and those who are, ultimately, expected to ''pay'' for the services rendered. By design, none of the intermediaries — agents — have personal [[skin in the game|skin]] in the [[infinite game]] and have only one conflicting interest: to ''keep playing''.<ref>See {=author|James P. Carse}}’s {{br|Finite and Infinite Games}}.<ref> But it is a powerful interest indeed. | |||
A second “tell” is for the size of money at stake to be so large that even a legal bill in the tens of millions will amount to a rounding error. | A second “tell” is for the size of money at stake to be so large that even a legal bill in the tens of millions will amount to a rounding error. | ||