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Burgess Shale: Difference between revisions
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This needs to be something visible, formal, countable for the [[Steerco]] PowerPoints and the presentations to regulators, public statements and so on. You can see how “we’re all being a bit more switched on from now on” doesn’t make for the most compelling press release in the world, after all. But overhauling systems is expensive, time consuming, difficult, and tends not to work so this is where dear old legal comes into the frame. | This needs to be something visible, formal, countable for the [[Steerco]] PowerPoints and the presentations to regulators, public statements and so on. You can see how “we’re all being a bit more switched on from now on” doesn’t make for the most compelling press release in the world, after all. But overhauling systems is expensive, time consuming, difficult, and tends not to work so this is where dear old legal comes into the frame. | ||
“Could we maybe put something in the docs?” the head of risk will gingerly enquire. | “Could we maybe put something in the docs?” the head of risk will gingerly enquire. He will direct this enquiry not to the [[SME]] in the derivatives team, whom he will not know to exist, but to the [[General Counsel]], who will “take an action” to get it done. (He won't know the SME in the derivatives team either). And so it shall be done: messages will be relayed down the chain, to our benighted derivatives SME to make it so, and up the chain to the management committee that it shall be done, so it can tick its box and approve the press release. | ||
Over the next 24 months, the documentation team will heroically battle away to get the new language in, but every major client will reject it, and after two years there will be exactly no examples of it in the agreement portfolio, though the negotiation throughput will be 25% slower as a result. This may lead to cost-cutting measures being imposed on the documentation unit. | |||
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how legal documents become so unwieldy, long, and why negotiating then is such a chore. In five years’ time another counterparty will blow up, and there will be exactly the same hue and cry, with exactly the same outcome. The ''chutzpah'' to think a problem significantly serious to cause a billion dollar loss really comes down to a representation no-one thought to add to the thousands of pointless representations already encrusted in the document no-one looks at. | |||
Perhaps, we venture, the problem is bigger than that. Perhaps it needs a weightier response. A different approach; a rethink; perhaps a superficial gloss on the current status quo won’t do. Perhaps, folks, ''it’s not about the docs''. | |||
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