Litigation lawyer

People Anatomy™
A spotter’s guide to the men and women of finance.

Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Archetypes

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

One of the sainted risk controllers of a financial services firm. An inhabitant of the litigation department. Litigators deal with ongoing customer complaints and, where clients have not come up to expectation, prosecute claims on the firm’s behalf. The litigation team would also claim have an advisory function, and encourage their colleagues to consult them ahead of time to avoid future angst.

This is a theoretical but not actual function, because no-one in their right mind would ask a litigation lawyer to bless any course of action more contentious than sitting cross-legged in an air-conditioned padded cubicle having first signed a lengthy disclaimer. Signing off hypothetical risk scenarios is just not how litigation lawyers roll.

In part this is because they are are short the same option as is any risk controller: There is no upside from signing off any risk that has not been fully diffused in a circle of escalation, underwritten in blood by someone else (ideally a Sullivan and Cromwell partner) and socialised to the General Counsel. But it is not just that: there's a personality element too. Litigation lawyers are preternaturally risk averse — fearful — by personal disposition. Loose cannon types rarely sign up to be litigation lawyers, and don’t last long if they do.

Nor are litigation lawyers any better a source of advice about contract drafting than trauma ward surgeons are about motor vehicle safety engineering. For, what better insight can a litigator give than, “for Christ’s sake, don’t wind up in court?” If you do wind up in court, hasn’t your contractual architecture already failed you utterly? To be sure, it might be a nice surprise to find the deckchair to which you are clinging floats, but how much nicer would it be were it still sitting on the sun-deck of a vessel still steaming towards the New World?

Contract design should avoid icebergs. A litigator can only help with sorting out whose fault it is should one have been hit. By then, the damage is done.

Thus, an in-house litigation team is basically the complaints division of the firm. Be wary when they wield inordinate influence. In recent times, some litigation teams have gone from half a junior lawyer, on flexi-time, between spells of maternity leave, to fully weaponised Death Stars of fusty, naturally censorious solicitors lacking the appetite for any call, however safe, or any risk, however remote.

Litigation lawyer

See also