Counterparty
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A counterparty is a legal and financial term. It means a party to a contract.
Example: If you have signed a contract with BigCompany that states that you will buy something from them, you and BigCompany are counterparties.
Any legal entity can be a counterparty. Examples of legal entities are corporations, a married couple, a limited partnership, a city, a financial exchange, etc.
Usually, to say that there are counterparties to an arrangement, it means that there is some potential for conflict between them. Ideally, a contract will spell out in explicit detail what each counterparty's rights and obligations are in every circumstance. However, this doesn't always happen. There are general provisions for how counterparties are treated under the law, and (at least in 'common law' legal systems) there is large amounts of case law to refer to for precedents (previous rulings).
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