Netting opinion
Not just a legal opinion — at the best of times a dreary, charmless and pointless affair — but one addressing one of the most soul-obliterating questions a grown adult could pose: whether the effectiveness of close-out netting under a master trading agreement would be respected by an insolvency administrator in the jurisdiction of an insolvent counterparty to that agreement.
Netting opinions tend to be long, academic, laden with hypotheticals, appealing to Latinate principles of civil law and demanding of unusually skilled powers of comprehension and patience — they are required by regulation to be, in fact — but when it comes down to it, they all say the same thing: that close-out netting is, ultimately, enforceable: because a netting opinion would have no reason to exist if it said anything else.
But God — manifesting Herself in the shape of the Basel Committee on Banking Regulations and Supervisory Practices, plays a cruel cosmic joke on all inhouse lawyers. By diktat of the latest Basel Accord) they must diligently read and draw reasoned conclusions from these God-forsaken tomes, so that their firm's financial controllers can recognise balance sheet reductions as a result.
Red Flag Act
Also, it is a fact, that no insolvency administrator, anywhere in the world, in the history of the world, has ever actually successfully challenged the netting down of offsetting transactions under a derivative trading agreement — or so far as this commentator knows, even tried to — because that would be a patently stupid thing to do, even by accident.