Ninth law of worker entropy: Difference between revisions
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A theory of negotiation which posits that as the number of people involved in negotiating a {{tag|contract}} goes up, the contract’s brevity, comprehensibility and utility ''goes down''. The longer a negotiation continues, the more complicated and tedious the contract will become, even though its meaningful content will stay constant or, more likely, decline. | |||
Briefly stated, however anal it may be to add qualifications, clarifications, [[for the avoidance of doubt]]s, [[without limitation]]s and other forensic {{f|celery | Briefly stated, however anal it may be to add qualifications, clarifications, [[for the avoidance of doubt]]s, [[without limitation]]s and other forensic {{f|celery}}, once these “correctives” have been made it is even ''more'' anal to try to remove them again, seeing as, [[Q.E.D.]], they make no difference to the legal or economic substance of the agreement either way. So, inevitably, one won’t [[I’m not going to die in a ditch about it|die in a ditch about it]], however appealing by comparison that experience might, to a [[prose stylist]], seem. | ||
===The risk anal drafting presents to the future of the universe as we know it=== | ===The risk anal drafting presents to the future of the universe as we know it=== | ||
Revision as of 10:38, 31 March 2017
A theory of negotiation which posits that as the number of people involved in negotiating a contract goes up, the contract’s brevity, comprehensibility and utility goes down. The longer a negotiation continues, the more complicated and tedious the contract will become, even though its meaningful content will stay constant or, more likely, decline.
Briefly stated, however anal it may be to add qualifications, clarifications, for the avoidance of doubts, without limitations and other forensic celery, once these “correctives” have been made it is even more anal to try to remove them again, seeing as, Q.E.D., they make no difference to the legal or economic substance of the agreement either way. So, inevitably, one won’t die in a ditch about it, however appealing by comparison that experience might, to a prose stylist, seem.
The risk anal drafting presents to the future of the universe as we know it
A negotiation’s “event horizon”[1] is the threshold beyond which, through serial “clarifications” from disparate lawyers, para-legals, negotiators and documentation specialists, the legal contract passes irreversibly into a heat death of pure ennui. An Earth-bound lawyer crossing that threshold passes a point of no return: she will be unable to resist the fascination of trying to understand and even further “improve” the contract, will hold out hope of rescuing it from semantic oblivion, but will eventually be crushed utterly by the colossal forces of gravitational tedium, whence her only hope is to be regurgitated into a parallel universe as a transverse spume of pure cosmic energy (known in some markets as an exchange-traded derivatives specialist).
This came close to happening in September 2008 during the finalisation of the 2008 ISDA Master Agreement, a catastrophic spacio-legal dislocation of Euclidian space-time that almost destroyed global finance as we know it.
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- ↑ also its “Schwarzschild radius ”