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 Of course, when you treat a customer like a presumptive criminal, it will tend to behave like one — this is the lesson of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment Stanford Prison Experiment] — as as a result commercial contracts look less like the exchange of lavender scented love-letters you would expect from deeply smitten long-term commercial partners, and more like downtown Beirut in 1976 just after a particularly vigorous shelling.
-Knowing one has a portfolio of such battle-tempered contracts bestows great comfort on senior personnel in [[credit]] and [[legal]], for it tells them all bad things that could come to pass have been anticipated, and accommodated, by the battery of preternaturally paranoid [[Contract negotiation|negotiation specialists]] they have at their disposal. They will hold forth at the merest invitation about the ''imperative'' of having “strong docs” as they see it, and will cite in support of their proposition the colossal resources the firm commits to its client documentation effort.
+Still, knowing one has a portfolio of such battle-tempered contracts bestows great comfort on senior personnel in [[credit]] and [[legal]], for it tells them all the bad things that could come to pass have been anticipated, and accommodated, by the battery of preternaturally paranoid [[Contract negotiation|negotiation specialists]] they have at their disposal. They will hold forth at the merest invitation about the ''imperative'' of having “strong docs” as they see it, and will cite in support of their proposition the colossal resources the firm commits to its client documentation effort.
-Now only a fool rushes in to pop a [[credit officer]]’s balloon, but seeming foolish has never stopped the [[JC]]. So here goes: we say this is a false comfort. Our evidence is purely, but compendiously, anecdotal. Client documents are are a wonderful thing in concept, in the abstract, just as long as you never have any critical need to look at them.
+Now, only a fool rushes in to pop a [[credit officer]]’s balloon, but seeming foolish has never stopped the [[JC]]. So here goes: we say ''this is a false comfort''. Our evidence is purely, but compendiously, anecdotal: client documents are are a wonderful thing — in concept; in the ''abstract —'' just as long as you never have any concrete need to ''look'' at them.
-Actually reading at them, especially with a view to ''doing'' something with them, is invariably a chastening experience. They were forged, as we have said in a series of guerilla skirmishes in a white-hot urban conflict. Inevitably, there is incoming, and usually the bullet holes turn out to be just where you don’t want them.
+Actually reading negotiated client documents, especially with a view to ''doing'' something with them, is a chastening experience.
+They were forged, as we have said, in a series of guerilla skirmishes in a white-hot urban conflict. But when the fog of war rolls in, unspeakable things happen. The normal rules of polite society give way to the furious, pragmatic, law of the jungle. You do not stand on ceremony when you are shipping sniper fire in a bombed-out basement: there is a single objective: ''to get out alive''. A negotiator knows, faintly, that once this fire-fight is over the documents over which she labours will be put away, and no-one will look at them again.
+For the great majority of all negotiated contracts, this is but practical common sense. They will never be looked at again. No one may know, we cannot tell, what pains they had to bear.
 {{sa}}