Playbook: Difference between revisions

:Should customer not accept ''Z'' either, there will follow an extended firefight between risk personnel from either organisation — conducted through their uncomprehending negotiation personnel — which will culminate with escalation to sales people on either side, and if that doesn’t do the trick, senior relationship management will be wheeled in, who will cave instantly to the client’s demand and broker a craven surrender at position ''Q'', some way ''past'' anything remotely necessary or reasonable.

But look at this from above: only positions ''X'' through ''Y'' are codified. Risk still had to improvise to make the key decision, ''Q''. The playbook, and all those wonderful systems and controls, were in play only between ''X'' and ''Y'', which turned out to be a mile behind what the front line.   

No doubt this will generate copious [[management information and statistics]] with which managers can regale their superiors with assorted [[Gantt chart|Gantt charts]], [[dashboard]]s and [[traffic lights]]. But all these gears are engaged, and all the systems and controls are running, ''over the boring bit'' of the process.  

And, at a cost: following this byzantine process and gathering this data over the boring part of the exercise occupies personnel and takes time: negotiation for ''all'' clients takes longer, and the gears, rules and triage are ''not'' engaged exactly the data set might get interesting: the exceptions.

The conundrum: since we know our walk-away position is Z (and, at a push, Q) why are we starting at X? Why expend effort mechanising an area of the battlefield behind your opponent’s lines which you have no realistic expectation of occupying?

Negotiation snags are either ''formal'' or ''substantive''.  

Formal hitches arise when clients (or their negotiation teams, which will also have been outsourced to Bucharest) don’t ''understand'' your terms and therefore challenge them.  

Substantive hitches arise when clients ''do'' understand your terms find your legal terms fundamentally unreasonable.

Both scenarios are likely; often at once: it’s likely people in your ''own'' organisation won’t understand your documents, so it is a bit rich expecting your clients to.<ref>Best example is the [[hypothetical broker dealer]] valuation terms in a [[synthetic equity swap]].  </ref>

The answer to both lies not in playbooks and organisational heft, but in improving product [[design]] and [[user experience]]. ''Making your documents better''.  

For confusing and often-misunderstood terms, the answer is straightforward, but difficult: ''simplify'' them. This is usually not just a matter of language, but logical structure — though simplifying language often illuminates convoluted logical structures too.  

And, while financial markets drafting is famously dreadful, emerging technologies can help: run your templates through a GPT-3 engine and ask it to simplify them. It won’t be perfect and will make errors, but ''it is free''. Checking for errors and running quality control is what ''you'' are for. It will break the back of an otherwise impossible job.

If you know you will settle at ''at least'' ''Z'', then what are you doing starting at X? Other than a clink of glasses in the risk team for a job well done, what have you achieved?

 

Your role is to get to the point of agreement as fast as possible. There are no prizes for time and energy expended in hand-to-hand combat at points ''X'', ''Y'' and ''Z'', if you don’t agree until Z'.

 

Yes, these are marginally preferable risk control terms, but if they are ''meaningfully'' better, then ''you should not be prepared to go as far as Z''.  

 

Identify walk away points and ''start'' with them.  

You will hear this a lot, as a self-serving justification for deliberately starting at a place clients won’t like, but there’s little data on it, and nor much reason to believe it is true.  

Why deliberately aggravate your clients just for the opportunity to [[performative]]ly climb down at the first objection? How does that create a better impression (off-market, disorganised, weak) than presenting a clear, coherent and fair document in the first place?

===[[Legaltech]] as enabler of sloppy thinking===

And here is where the great promise to LegalTech stumbles. It offers the capacity to do clerical jobs faster. It opens the door to infinite variability, optionality, within your standard forms. Tech can now accommodate any complications in your standard forms that you can be bothered dreaming up.  

{{sa}}