King’s Counsel: Difference between revisions

[[File:Jolly contrarian.png|450px|thumb|center|A Queen’s Counsel — {{jerrold}}, to be precise — yesterday.]]

}}Senior, brainy, court lawyers. The [[JC]] is lucky enough to know a few, largely because he shares with them a fondness for [[cricket]]. They are excellent men and women, to a one, but they engage in a part of the legal process clear of which the [[JC]] is constitutionally committed to steering as he can: [[litigation]]. Not just because suing and being sued is hard, gives you a tension headache and is beset with fiddly, procedural bear traps, but because the road is strewn with absurd conventions, unarticulated rules of etiquette and unspoken ways of behaving that you have to get ''[[Substance and form|formally]]''; right, hang whether you were right [[Substance and form|in ''substance'']]. That’s not just how the [[JC]] rolls.

In legal practice, court lawyering is ''golf'' you see, and the [[JC]] is a ''cricket'' kind of fellow, not just in pastime, but by disposition. Litigation is combative: it has ''etiquette'' to mask a fundamental ugliness. Commerce is co-operative. “Being a good sport” is a point of [[substance]] and not [[form]].

There is also the small matter that, for any proud contracts lawyer, even ''talking'' to a Queen’s Counsel — to ''any'' litigator, really — except one you are standing next to in the slips — ''is a confession of professional failure''. We commercial contracts folk cannot notch our belt with conquests; there are no kill emblems pasted on our fuselage. We must take our pleasures another way. We do this by our ''lack''of rancour; we know we have done it when we see our clients going peaceably about their business, promending down the high street in their finery, waving cheerily at us from the wheel of the fancy motorcar our careful stewardship has enabled them to afford.  

We are like dogs in the nighttime: you know us because we do ''not'' bark. We mark our performance by the ''lack'' of cuts, scrapes, bruises and abrasions on our pretty faces. Our measure of success is contracts ''so clear'' that no one would ''dream'' of arguing.

For the most part, [[financial services]] professionals know enough of what they are about that their contracts — the “[[verbiage]]” — don’t often wind up in court. When they do, it usually follows some cataclysmic failure, where institutions that were conventionally understood to be immortal, impervious to weakness and managed by enlightened auteurs turn out to have been run by morons. These discoveries tend to be cyclical; over-lionised morons may go years or even decades without being exposed. But, suddenly, [[Lehman]], you know. [[Enron]]. The commercial world is all at once awash with litigation — much of it conducted by, on behalf of and in front of people with barely the first idea about the complexities of financial services contracts.

Now, readers, exactly the same thing is true of litigators. Just as commercial lawyers hate litigation, litigators ''hate'' financial markets transactions. They’re hard, they give you a tension headache, they are beset with fiddly, procedural bear traps, and the road to their comprehension is strewn with absurd conventions, unspoken rules of etiquette and modes behaviour that you have to get ''[[Substance and form|formally]]''; right, hang whether you were right [[Substance and form|in ''substance'']]. It is much more fun cross-examining [[Mrs. Pinterman]] about her alibi, establishing the [[mens rea]] and objecting to things. I mean security waterfalls? COME ON.

Now every now and then, a curly question might arise as to the meaning of an {{isdama}}, or a {{gmsa}}, or a {{gmra}}. It might perplex [[Magic circle law firm|magic circle]] [[partner]]s — people who, let it be said,''wrote'' the damn things, back in the day —but to give those august men and women the benefit of the doubt, they don’t see so many master agreements these days. So if a practical person wanted a sensible answer on a curly question on how an {{isdama}} should work, who would she ask?

Do you see where I am going with this? My friends, ''I'' would ask a down-home expert. Ideally, ''someone who has spent twenty years in the [[doc unit]]''. To be sure, end users are falling over themselves to rid themselves of these people and replace them with school-leabers in Bucharest, but they are a tenacious bunch. Many are still around.

But this is ''not'' what [[magic circle law firm]]s do. Instead, they ask the one group in the world who charge ''more'' than they do, and who are ''less'' likely to have a practical clue what the right answer should be: [[Queen’s Counsel]].