Relating to champerty, which is an illegal agreement where someone pays another person's legal costs in exchange for a share of any money won in court.
From Old French 'champart' (share of harvest) + the suffix '-ous'. The term evolved in medieval times to describe unethical legal arrangements, particularly in English common law where courts sought to prevent disputes over profits from lawsuits.
Medieval courts were so worried about lawyers and wealthy nobles buying into poor people's lawsuits just to make money that they made champerty illegal—it's basically the ancestor of modern rules preventing conflicts of interest in law, and the word itself comes from farming practices!
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