Contract analysis: Difference between revisions

Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Preternaturally intelligent silicon minds scanning and processing gigabytes of diverse text in an instant and analysing it for all material quirks and issues, like Zen from ''Blake’s Seven''.

But let’s just stop and consider what is actually going on here. J.P. Morgan reviewing, presumably tens and probably ''hundreds'' of thousands of commercial loans. (I am allowing JPM’s [[legal eagles]], for whom I have great respect, ten hours to review each loan.)

These loans will be lengthy and rendered in the hideous, overwrought prose of the banking lawyer, to be sure, but — even allowing for template variations and evolution (by which I mean periodic [[Cambrian explosion]]s  of flannelry — to which not even the House of Morgan is immune), ''the contracts will all be the same''. There will be a basic, predictable, schedule of customer details and economic variables — dates, amounts, currencies, rates, and optional elections — but the ''legal terms'' of the loans will be more or less homogeneous.

So, “reviewing commercial loan agreements” means processing thirty 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 saps up the wall'', but to be clear it would require ''absolutely no judgement, let alone legal acumen''.