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Legal services delivery: Difference between revisions
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The ''content'' of legal services is entirely opaque to them. The actual law is — by the careful design of generations of nest-feathering<ref>Did I say “nest-feathering”? I meant “[[noble, fearless and brave]].”</ref> lawyers — baffling, long-winded and obtuse. It is quite incomprehensible to the management layer. Management must therefore take the lawyers at their word, and thus they must take the [[pizza]] as they find it it: whole, ineffable, immutable, and stuffed with odd things like artichoke, pineapple and anchovy:<ref>For the record: artichoke yes, anchovy, utterly. But ''pineapple'', a ''never''.</ref> basically, an unsolvable brute fact of the universe. A manager cannot say “[[cross default]] is stupid” (though it is). She cannot say “you do not need that absurd [[indemnity]]; you would never use it, and a court would never enforce it,” however much these things may be true. | The ''content'' of legal services is entirely opaque to them. The actual law is — by the careful design of generations of nest-feathering<ref>Did I say “nest-feathering”? I meant “[[noble, fearless and brave]].”</ref> lawyers — baffling, long-winded and obtuse. It is quite incomprehensible to the management layer. Management must therefore take the lawyers at their word, and thus they must take the [[pizza]] as they find it it: whole, ineffable, immutable, and stuffed with odd things like artichoke, pineapple and anchovy:<ref>For the record: artichoke yes, anchovy, utterly. But ''pineapple'', a ''never''.</ref> basically, an unsolvable brute fact of the universe. A manager cannot say “[[cross default]] is stupid” (though it is). She cannot say “you do not need that absurd [[indemnity]]; you would never use it, and a court would never enforce it,” however much these things may be true. | ||
A manager knows that only one with magic powers can say those things. | A manager knows that only [[Legal eagle|one with magic powers]] can say those things. A manager can only focus on the things she ''does'' understand: the ''price'' of such a person, not her ''value''. | ||
But there is a dark inversion to this ignorance. For such is the inscrutability of the legal craft — so ''impenetrable'' — that a manager knows only that one ''has'' this magic, or one ''has not''. Those who ''have'' it are interchangeable; substitutable; switchable; ''[[fungible]]''. Any of them will do and the cheapest is best. Hence the regular reconnaissance missions to those parts of Manila where the streets have no name. | |||
===The irony of the ineffable=== | ===The irony of the ineffable=== | ||
Thus our manager arrives at the notion of ''delivery''. “I must have this ineffable magic,” she realises, “but it could be delivered from London, or Belfast, or Gdansk, a someone rifling through a [[playbook]] on his lap from a service centre on the outskirts of Hanoi.” | Thus, our manager arrives at the notion of ''delivery''. “I must have this ineffable magic,” she realises, “but it could be delivered from London, or Belfast, or Gdansk, a someone rifling through a [[playbook]] on his lap from a service centre on the outskirts of Hanoi.” | ||
She cannot rationalise legal product, nor simplify it, nor cauterise it and expunge the [[tedium]] with which all legal product overflows — but she ''can'' parcel it up and outsource it. This is the tragic irony of the ineffability of the law. | She cannot rationalise legal product, nor simplify it, nor cauterise it and expunge the [[tedium]] with which all legal product overflows — but she ''can'' parcel it up and outsource it. This is the tragic irony of the ineffability of the law. | ||