Contract analysis: Difference between revisions

But let’s just stop and consider what is actually going on here: a  bank seeking to reviewing tens and probably ''hundreds'' of thousands of ''its own'' commercial loans. These loans will be rendered in the hideous, overwrought prose of the banking lawyer, to be sure, but — even allowing for template variations and [[Legal evolution|evolution]] (by which I mean periodic [[Cambrian explosion]]s  of [[flannel|flannelry]] — to which not even the House of Morgan is immune), ''the contracts will all be basically the same''. If there has been a modicum of legal design applied — okay, that’s quite a big if — there will be a predictable schedule of customer details and economic variables — dates, amounts, currencies, rates, and optional elections — but the ''legal terms'', however gruesomely articulated, will be homogeneous and, in any case ''within the bank’s control'': a commercial bank with half a brain won’t ''allow'' its cusotmers to wordsmith its standard terms. If it does, then ''that'' is the problem to be solved, not “how can I possibly understand all these varied terms I have agreed with hundreds of thousands of customers?” Note the irony: the facility to even contemplate micro-variations to standard contractual terms was bestowed by technology, and is another example of the [[technology paradox]]. Technology that encourages you to ''ignore'' the [[root cause]] of your problems is ''bad'' technology.  

So, “reviewing one hundred thousand commercial loan agreements” really means “processing one hundred thousand tables of variables”. This, doubtless, would take an ''aeon'' if assigned to a battalion of [[legal eagles]], and would in the process ''drive each of the poor buggers up the wall'', but to be clear it would require ''absolutely no judgement, let alone legal acumen''. It is a matter of transcription.