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This puts our old friend the [[drills and holes]] conundrum into perspective: it is true that a corporation desires quick, cheap and effective legal services. In many cases, it does not need ''any'' legal services ''at all'' — it could do not just with legal protections delivered in a convenient format and by a less expensive source, but ''no legal protections at all''. What percentage of legal agreements are ever litigated? But it is hard for an inanimate pile of papers filed at companies registry to have that sort of insight. It relies on its agents to arrive at that conclusion on its behalf. But who, amongst the byzantine control structure that those very agents have constructed to help it make decisions of that sort — its [[inhouse counsel]], [[outhouse counsel]], credit risk management, document [[negotiators]], client [[onboarding]] team, [[compliance]] or [[internal audit]] — who of these people would ever say that? And even if one did, would {{sex|he}} not be shut down by the consensus of the others?<ref>Those who don’t believe me should try proposing that you don’t need [[cross default]] in trading agreements. You will get bilateral consensus on this, in private conversations, from almost everyone; no-one will say it in public.</ref>
This puts our old friend the [[drills and holes]] conundrum into perspective: it is true that a corporation desires quick, cheap and effective legal services. In many cases, it does not need ''any'' legal services ''at all'' — it could do not just with legal protections delivered in a convenient format and by a less expensive source, but ''no legal protections at all''. What percentage of legal agreements are ever litigated? But it is hard for an inanimate pile of papers filed at companies registry to have that sort of insight. It relies on its agents to arrive at that conclusion on its behalf. But who, amongst the byzantine control structure that those very agents have constructed to help it make decisions of that sort — its [[inhouse counsel]], [[outhouse counsel]], credit risk management, document [[negotiators]], client [[onboarding]] team, [[compliance]] or [[internal audit]] — who of these people would ever say that? And even if one did, would {{sex|he}} not be shut down by the consensus of the others?<ref>Those who don’t believe me should try proposing that you don’t need [[cross default]] in trading agreements. You will get bilateral consensus on this, in private conversations, from almost everyone; no-one will say it in public.</ref>
===Big law and the agency problem===
===Big law and the agency problem===
Just as humans did not domesticate wheat so much as wheat domesticated humans,<ref>A {{author|Yuval Noah Harari}} ''bon mot'' that owes something to {{author|Richard Dawkins}}’ idea of the [[extended phenotype]], we feel.</ref> a good case can be made that [[investment bank]]s did not cultivate big law as much as big law — oh, okay, and big consultancy — cultivated the banks. Our [[IB GC genealogy]] refers.
Just one can make the case that humans did not domesticate wheat so much as wheat domesticated humans,<ref>A {{author|Yuval Noah Harari}} ''bon mot'' that owes something to {{author|Richard Dawkins}}’ idea of the [[extended phenotype]], we feel.</ref> so might one argue that [[investment bank]]s did not cultivate [[big law]] firms as much as [[big law]] — oh, okay, and [[big consultancy]] — cultivated the investment banks. Our [[IB GC genealogy]] refers.
 
For there are certain pillars of bank activity — the conduct of [[litigation]] being one, the execution corporate advisory business another and let us throw in the wheel-spinning “industry” of [[industry associations]] for a third — whose conduct so depends upon, and is in thrall to, the memetic interests and commercial imperatives of law firms, to the outright detriment of anyone else involved, that it is hard to rationalise these activities other than as some kind of extended phenotype for private practice of commercial law.


There are certain pillars of bank activity — the conduct of [[litigation]] being one and the execution corporate advisory business for another — and lets throw in the wheel-spinning “industry” of [[industry associations]] while we are at it — that are so dependent on, and in thrall to, the commercial imperatives of the advisor to the outright detriment of the client that the in-house legal department’s job is really to make life as easy as possible for the law firms to recover their recorded chargeable time.
In this view, the in-house [[legal department]] — a bank function all but unknown thirty years ago, but now so monstrous that it needs its own chief operating officer</ref>our [[history of inhouse legal]] refers.<ref> — really only exists to make life as easy as possible for the law firms to optimise recovery of recorded chargeable time.


A warning flag: any kind of structural intermediation between those who ''instruct'' the lawyers and those who are expected to ''pay'' for them. That might be the advisory bank’s legal department on one hand (instructing) and the advised client on the other (paying), or it might just be the legal department and the banks actual shareholders.
A warning flag: any kind of structural intermediation between those who ''instruct'' the lawyers and those who are expected to ''pay'' for them. That might be the advisory bank’s legal department on one hand (instructing) and the advised client on the other (paying), or it might just be the legal department and the banks actual shareholders.
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