By Rachel Feintzeig
Do you drop phrases like ?amend and pretend,? ?delay and pray? and ?you snooze, you lose? in the courtroom with the deft of a restructuring rapper, or are you sometimes secretly confounded by all those rhymes?
Do mentions of cherry picking and bagels evoke bankruptcy connotations for you or simply make you hungry for lunch?
And can you actually define indubitable equivalent, or do you just kind of know it when you see it?
If you waffled on the answers to any of those questions, law firm Latham & Watkins has an app for you. Its newest iTunes release, ?The Book of Jargon: Global Restructuring,? is chock full of over 1,000 complicated terms translated into plain English and ready for you to pull up on your iPhone at your next client meeting (discreetly under the table, of course).
Peter Gilhuly, a partner with Latham and head of its West Coast restructuring practice, said the downloadable distress dictionary arose from the words of bankruptcy professionals themselves, who have developed a language out of the scores of terms thrown around in the pursuit of rescuing a company. He calls the lingo ?colorful? yet ?efficient? and says it saves the pros time in a fast-paced industry.
?You use the shorthand because it?s a complicated language and you don?t want to spend all day repeating the words,? he said.
Still, he acknowledges that for newcomers to the profession, or even seasoned professionals practicing in a faraway jurisdiction for the first time, a global guide is indispensible.
?This, in a lot of ways, I think demystifies what sounds like a very complicated area,? he said of the app, which includes phrases used in more than 10 countries, from Sweden to Saudi Arabia.
?The Book of Jargon: Global Restructuring? is the fourth in a series from Latham & Watkins. (Other handy guides focus on topics such as project finance, European capital markets and bank finance and have garnered more than 25,000 downloads in total.) But Gilhuly thinks bankruptcy, in particular, lends itself to such a format.
?I think bankruptcy has more of its share of this kind of jargon,? he said. ?It?s complicated concepts, it?s code-based, and there?s a lot of numbers.?
Plus, the practice has grown more complex in recent years, and the speech patterns mirror that. As an example, Gilhuly cites rights offerings, which have come into vogue as a way for cash-strapped companies looking for a way out of bankruptcy to raise funds and have left a stream of complex terms in their wake.
It?s not all dense phrases and doom, though. The book also incorporates that unique animal: bankruptcy humor.
?We put some things in just for fun,? Gilhuly said.
That includes inside jokes (like the bagel entry, a nod to a venerable restructuring professional who, legend has it, once threw a bagel at someone in a moment of bankruptcy-fueled anger) and ?Star Wars? references. (Yes, C-3PO is in there.) Some entries blend the legitimate with the lively?for example, ?zombie? is slang used to describe a company so far gone it?s barely functioning, but the definition also references the classic movie ?Night of the Living Dead.?
Other phrases are just tough nuts to crack, no matter how you approach them. Take ?indubitable equivalent,? for example, a concept that played a starring role in the most recent bankruptcy issue to make it to the Supreme Court and is even the name of the American Bankruptcy Institute?s house band. And yet, it remains mysterious and ambiguous to many restructuring experts, Gilhuly said.
It appears in the Bankruptcy Code, but it?s not even defined there, he added.
Still, the Latham & Watkins attorneys who worked on the ?Book of Jargon? gave it their best shot. It?s in there right between ?independent director? and ?information circular.?
Write to Rachel Feintzeig at rachel.feintzeig@dowjones.com.
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