Litigationey

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Litigationey
/ˌlɪtɪˈɡeɪʃᵊni/ (Also suish, squabblative (adj.)
of a commercial issue, important, basically straightforward, but thanks to the intervention of professional advisors, rendered in language so opaque that no-one knows what is really going on. Often describes commercial endeavours that are predicated on plausible deniability — for example, that credit default swaps are not insurance contracts, or that equity swaps aren’t [stamp duty|stampable]] investments in shares — which fictions oblige practitioners to adopt silly walks, secret handshakes and elliptical ways of describing ordinary things, all in the service of not uttering inconvenient realities.

They become squabblative because while the practitioners who propagate these arrangements are well drilled, fluent and strongly incentivised to maintain this theatre, their counterparts in the litigation department, at the bar and on the bench are not.

We have remarked before about the differing functions a contract has during its lifecycle