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Document risk: Difference between revisions
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The risk an organisation faces that loses money because of substandard legal contracts with its customers. | The risk an organisation faces that loses money because of substandard legal contracts with its customers. | ||
The ordinary means of defending against document risk is, therefore, to treat | The ordinary means of defending against document risk is, therefore, to treat client contracts as if they are communiqués drawn up between hostile nations on the eve of war. | ||
Of course, when you treat a customer like a presumptive criminal, it will tend to behave like one — this is the lesson of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment Stanford Prison Experiment] — | Of course, when you treat a customer like a presumptive criminal, it will tend to behave like one — this is the lesson of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment Stanford Prison Experiment] — and so, by the time they are concluded, commercial contracts look less like the exchange of lavender-scented love letters you would expect, and more like downtown Beirut in 1976 just after a particularly vigorous shelling. | ||
But one scarred, bullet-riddled incomprehensible tract is a tragedy; a hundred thousand of them are a statistic: a ''healthy'' statistic, a collective mass that conceals each ugly instance. | |||
Still, knowing one has a portfolio of such battle-tempered contracts bestows great comfort on senior personnel in [[credit]] and [[legal]], for it tells them all the bad things that could come to pass have been anticipated, and accommodated, by the battery of preternaturally paranoid [[Contract negotiation|negotiation specialists]] they have at their disposal. They will hold forth at the merest invitation about the ''imperative'' of having “strong docs” as they see it, and will cite in support of their proposition the colossal resources the firm commits to its client documentation effort. | Still, knowing one has a portfolio of such battle-tempered contracts bestows great comfort on senior personnel in [[credit]] and [[legal]], for it tells them all the bad things that could come to pass have been anticipated, and accommodated, by the battery of preternaturally paranoid [[Contract negotiation|negotiation specialists]] they have at their disposal. They will hold forth at the merest invitation about the ''imperative'' of having “strong docs” as they see it, and will cite in support of their proposition the colossal resources the firm commits to its client documentation effort. | ||