Consider a client four years into a label deal. The advance is long-spent, the last release was eighteen months ago, and every conversation about the next album goes nowhere. The client is not in breach, but is stuck, and the team has asked you to map the way out.

There are four ways out of a stuck deal, and they sit on a ladder from gentle to nuclear: a renegotiation letter, private mediation, the contract's arbitration clause, and finally High Court litigation. Each rung is slower, costlier, and more adversarial than the one below it.

The governing principle is proportionality, you start at the lowest rung that could realistically achieve the client's goal, and only climb when a rung fails or is blocked. Jumping straight to litigation when a letter would have worked burns money and goodwill you can't get back. The job is to work out which rung is proportionate, what each would cost, and which is most likely to actually work.