Given the many compliance and legal concerns on Wall Street, member firms tend to pay lots of bucks to lawyers and compliance consultants to draft all sorts of documents.  Unfortunately, those materials tend to take on the aura of carved-in-stone when they should be reviewed to ensure that they reflect new rules, regulations, policies, and procedures -- and that production/reproduction errors have not altered the language.  Given the blanket application of the Bank Secrecy Act, it's somewhat odd that Mesirow failed to detect the critical omission in its Clearing Agreement.

All of which reminds me of an incident some 30 years ago when I was working in-house at a major brokerage firm and in diligently reading through a hoary internal document, I uncovered a paragraph that made no sense -- literally, no sense whatsoever.  Why?  Well, as best that I could tell, a prior editing resulted in a failed cut-and-paste that produced two sentence fragments.  One of my bosses laughed when I showed him my discovery, said that I had done a good job finding a mistake that had likely passed through many prior reviewers over the years, but concluded that since no one had ever pointed out hte errors that it was probably best to just leave things as they were!