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 brief: How reliably close you can sync to the magical Friday, 6pm deadline before dropping a “drafts required by open of business tomorrow” instruction on your external advisors;
- Inexplicable delay: For how many weeks you can leave a draft — whose immediate turnaround you signalled was as a matter of life and death, and which, your legal team rearranged long-standing plans for the theatre, wedding anniversaries and so on to produce by your deadline — before deigning to look at it?
- Can I speak to a partner please? The disdain with which you regard juniors on the external team should they try to answer your uninformed questions about a document they spent sixteen hours preparing;
- Red-herring ninjadom: The comprehensiveness and depth of 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, the brazen superficiality of your amendments to perfectly sound legal drafting? Additional points for refusing to hear of modifications to your own mangled syntax;
- Throw the associate under the bus: The shamelessness with which 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.
- External law-firm management: The feverish ingenuity of requiring all external spend over £2,500 to go through a mandatory three-way bidding process.