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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. | 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. He will direct this enquiry not to the [[subject matter expert]] 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 | “Could we maybe put something in the docs?” the [[Chief risk officer|head of risk]] will gingerly enquire. He will direct this enquiry not to the [[subject matter expert]] 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, the last to hear will be our benighted derivatives [[SME]], and by the time she gets wind of it, not only will it be far too late to beseech anyone to see sense, the deadline to make it so will have already expired, so she must do what she can, as quickly as she can, to report back up the chain to the management committee that it ''has'' been done, so someone important can tick a box and approve a 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 legal team — principally the derivatives SME, since she was the one that put in the language that caused all the bottlenecks in the first place. | |||
Perhaps, we venture, the problem is bigger than that. Perhaps | And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how legal documents become so unwieldy, and why negotiating then is such a chore. In five years’ time ''another'' [[family office]] 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 that, in its way, ''is'' the problem. Perhaps we need a weightier response. A different approach; a re-think; perhaps a superficial gloss on the current status quo won’t do. | |||
Perhaps, folks, ''{{maxim|it’s not about the docs}}''. | |||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||