If in doubt, stick it in

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Also known as Casanova’s advice or the credit officer’s refrain, “If in doubt, stick it in” — a blunt finger-post to the nearest negotiation oubliette — is an admonition that rings daily around the cloistered spaces of every institution but is only offered, in these pages, with a generous helping of irony.

“Well, it can’t hurt to ask.”

But it can hurt to ask. Every time you ask, a little part of your negotiation team dies.

So: better advice: murder your darlings. Or, as our brethren legal eagles would say, subject one’s darlings, or procure that such darlings are subjected to, culpable homicide.

There are two kinds of pointless things we habitually stick in contracts: absurd asks by the risk team, which all at the coalface know will be just as habitually rejected by any counterparty advisor with a pulse, even if the senior risk team draw come kind of delusional comfort from the fact they such terms are being sought at all; the other is matters of tedious compliance — be they accommodations of misconceived pedantries buried in developing regulation or internal policy overreactions brought about during the recovery process from blunt trauma — in either case resulting in gnomic confections piped into the back end of your contract templates like so much kitchen dirt swept under a rug, only to fossilise there, unloved, undisturbed, until overlaid with yet more scar tissue.

See also

• Why are contract forms so long?
• Negotiation oubliette
• Credit department
• Give it a try
• Audit paradox