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 Banks did not domesticate law firms. Law firms domesticated banks.”
 :—Noah Yuval Harari, ''Legio Cadabra: A Brief History of The Magic Circle''}}
-{{Definitely|Law firm panel||n|}}Proof that, far from being a seething pit of apex predation, the financial services industry is no more than an [[extended phenotype]] — a gruesome, metastasised [[spandrel]] illuminating the space between adjacent domes of legal excellence — that exists for the pleasure and enrichment of those saintly white-shoed attorneys who grace the serene frescoes overhead.
+{{D|Law firm panellɔː fɜːm ˈpænᵊl||n|}}Proof that, far from being a seething pit of apex predation, the financial services industry is no more than an [[extended phenotype]] — a gruesome, metastasised [[spandrel]] illuminating the space between adjacent domes of legal excellence — that exists for the pleasure and enrichment of those saintly white-shoed attorneys who grace the serene frescoes overhead.
-.
-{{drop|T|he image of investment banks}} as docile harnessed sauropods munching stupidly away in the service of pan-dimensional superbeings — and not just their executives — might not be the first one that springs to mind. But nor does it immediately grab us that wheat coopted unwitting humankind to serve its basest biological ends, but that is what Noah Yuval Harari tells us.
-But banking is riven with contraction. That such devoted apostles of laissez-faire should instinctively organise themselves into Marxist dictatorships should tell us something is not right.
+{{drop|T|he image of investment}} banks as docile, harnessed sauropods, munching stupidly away in the unwitting service of a higher caste of pan-dimensional superbeings seems far-fetched. But so does the idea of wheat bending the staggering intellect of humankind towards its merest biological ends, but that is what evolutionists would have us believe.<ref>others are still offering odds that thus is a deterministic crock, but that is another story.</ref>
+Could these masters of the universe really be so feckless as to be in the thrall of [[legal eagles]]?
+Do not dismiss it out of hand. Banking is riven with contradiction. That such devoted apostles of laissez-faire should instinctively organise themselves into Marxist dictatorships should tell us something is not right.
 The law firm panel, we submit, is another.
-It looks like a case of the banks taming and cultivating their legal advisors: penning them in, maximising their contribution, squeezing them in and extracting all remaining marrow from their tired bones — but it looks that way for wheat, too.
+What looks like a case of the apex predator taming, husbanding and cultivating a subordinate species for their own ends: penning them in, fattening them a bit — in any case maximising their yield, wringing from the marrow of their tired bones a concentrated extract of value out of all proportion to their cost of carry — is nothing of the kind.
+It seemed that way for wheat, too. Only no-one, as far as JC knows, ever hired the wheat to run the wheat harvesting operation.
+Yet this is just what corporations have done. These are enterprises who, thirty years ago, barely ''had'' a legal department. Our [[history of in-house legal]] refers. What started out as a guy in a cardigan filling [[slavenburg]]s and authorising powers of attorney grew like topsy. What was one became five became, by the financial crisis, five hundred. Legal departments, conceived as a means of exercising operational control, began needing it themselves. In-house departments began acting like a fifth column for the law firms they were meant to be managing.
+Every now and then an upstart banker asks an impertinent question:
+{{Quote|
+{{drop|“W|}}e have a legal department numbering twelve hundred. That is about the size of Herbert Smith. All told it costs us half a billion. Yet we are still blowing ten figures a year on external legal firms. Can someone explain this to me?”}}
-The panel  springs from an observation — investment banks spend an awful lot of money of legal fees — coupled with that unavoidable trope of modern commerce: ''scale is everything''.
+The “law firm panel” arrangement springs from an observation — investment banks spend an awful lot of money of legal fees — coupled with that unavoidable trope of modern commerce: ''scale is everything''.
-Picture the scene: an enterprising fellow in the [[Legal operations|legal COO]] team has pulled 5 years’ of legal spend, totalled it, and used the AVERAGE function in Excel. It generates this no-brainer:
+Picture the scene: an enterprising fellow in the [[Legal operations|legal COO]] team has pulled 5 years’ of legal spend, totalled it, and used the AVERAGE function in Ex. cel. It generates this no-brainer:
 {{Quote|