Inhouse legal team of the year
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People Anatomy™
A spotter’s guide to the men and women of finance.
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To bring some rigour to the annual Awards season, the JC is pleased to announce the judging criteria for inhouse legal team of the year award.
- Timeliness of instructions: How reliably close you can get to the magical Friday, 6pm deadline before dropping a “drafts required by open of business tomorrow” instruction on your external advisors;
- Inexplicable delay: How many weeks can you leave a draft whose immediate turnaround you signalled was as a matter of life and death — and to produce which, your legal team rearranged long-standing plans for the theatre, wedding anniversaries and so on — before deigning to so much as look at it?
- Can I speak to a partner please? The disdain with you regard junior members of the external team should they try to answer your elementary questions about the draft they spent sixteen hours preparing;
- Red-herring ninjadom: How comprehensive and particular is your knowledge of the punctuation, typography, weight and leading of your employer’s legal name wherever it appears in a prospectus?
- Mark-up pedantry: Beyond the inherent pedantry of the red-herring ninja, how brazenly superficial are your amendments to your counsel’s perfectly sound legal drafting?
- Throw the associate under the bus: How shamelessly will you blame the most junior member of outside counsel team — the same one whose name you keep forgetting and whose legal assurances count for nothing in the “can I speak to a partner please” category — for neglecting to prepare and circulate “critical legal documentation” that has, in fact, been in your inbox since 4.30 am on the Saturday morning immediately following your request for it.
- The competitive bid: Ingeniously deciding to make all external spend over £2,500 subject to a mandatory three-way competitive bidding process.