Our Finance Group helps clients navigate the business and legal complexities of novel and multidimensional debt financing transactions. We fully understand the challenges faced by borrowers, investors and lenders throughout a company’s lifecycle, from evolving techniques in acquisition finance to the tensions inherent in distressed situations. We are the firm of choice for the most innovative and complex financing matters, including bespoke structured financings and whole-business securitizations of novel assets and restructurings of multibillion-dollar companies.
Our Practice
Our Finance Group advises on a vast array of complex debt financings, providing our clients with a multitude of tools to achieve their business goals. Our work encompasses lender and borrower-side leveraged finance transactions, award-winning securitizations and complex derivatives structures across a broad array of industries.
Our clients benefit from our finance team’s deep experience in structuring and negotiating debt facilities to fund acquisitions, asset-based revolving credit facilities, second lien loans and other types of debt. Beyond executing the most sophisticated lending and high-yield transactions in the market, we provide strategic guidance, including helping clients safely navigate market volatility.
Our team specializes in transactions with unusual structures or assets. Some of our capabilities include:
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Leveraged Finance
The leveraged finance practice at Paul, Weiss provides counsel to clients who structure and negotiate all types of leveraged finance transactions, including acquisitions, recapitalizations, refinancings and restructurings. Our clients include private equity sponsors and their portfolio companies, public and private companies and financial institutions in a variety of industries. While we are exceptionally familiar with market terms and customs, we have found that offering creative solutions to otherwise intractable issues is our greatest virtue.
Structured Finance & Securitizations
Our Finance Group has significant experience in all aspects of international and domestic structured finance and securitization transactions, including in bespoke structures or assets. We are the market leader in whole-business securitizations, and we have also structured hundreds of deals for a broad range of asset classes, including franchises, alarm receivables, trade receivables, intellectual property, patent royalties, equipment leases, billboards and contract rights, such as lottery awards and structured settlements. We also have expertise in the media and entertainment industry, developing an array of innovative structures from music catalogs to sports financing to film financing slate deals.
Financial Services & Sponsor Finance
The Paul, Weiss Financial Services Group is a premier destination for global alternative asset managers, retirement service providers, insurers, banks and other lending platforms seeking sophisticated and innovative advice on a wide spectrum of financial products and transactions, including acquisitions of financial assets, establishment of financing and origination platforms and bespoke structured financing solutions. Our lawyers combine technical and analytical skill and extensive industry knowledge to help our clients reduce risk, achieve strategic objectives and navigate specialized financing, insurance and annuities markets. We offer practical, tailored advice that reflects both our deep understanding of cutting-edge financial markets and the regulatory landscape.
We have extensive experience structuring innovative capital solutions which optimize capital structures, ratings requirements and regulatory capital treatment through a variety of complex financial products including:
- proprietary loan origination platforms
- asset-backed warehouse facilities and bespoke securitizations
- commercial real estate finance, specialized project and trade finance, and fixed annuities
- synthetic structured leverage, derivative trading platforms and other “one-of-a-kind” structures
The team integrates our firm's market-leading finance, capital markets, derivatives, investment management, M&A and tax capabilities to provide holistic, integrated solutions aligned with global compliance regimes.
Derivatives and Structured Products
Paul, Weiss advises both sell-side and buy-side clients in the design, negotiation and execution of a wide range of derivatives instruments and transactions across underlying asset classes, including credit, equity, fixed income, distressed debt, commodities and FX. We advise financial institutions, funds and their investment advisers, and corporate entities on how to structure over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives instruments for financing, hedging, leverage and synthetic exposure purposes; negotiate and implement comprehensive derivatives documentation infrastructures; and resolve related credit, regulatory, legal and risk management issues, especially in relation to ongoing regulatory reform. Our team represents users of derivatives who need to protect and enforce their rights against struggling or bankrupt counterparties; address outstanding derivatives in restructurings; or take advantage of strategic investment opportunities.