Finance
Shipman’s finance team includes more than 40 lawyers across all of our offices, who are well-versed in the legal framework that protects the interests of our clients—lenders, borrowers and intermediaries—to ensure fairness, and integrity while safeguarding investor and lender rights. Shipman has teams of lawyers in all areas of finance, including: commercial and industrial finance and lending; real estate finance; renewable energy financing, tax credit finance; mezzanine finance; and workouts, restructuring and bankruptcy. We also have dedicated teams of attorneys who focus specifically on capital markets and corporate trust transactions and defaults, syndicated loans, and public finance for municipalities and other public entities.
Shipman’s banking and financial services team provides sophisticated advice to market-leading multinational, money-center, regional banks, community banks, bank holding companies, commercial financial institutions, and other lenders. Our lawyers have extensive experience structuring, negotiating and documenting a wide range of complex, multimillion-dollar commercial, real estate, asset-based, mezzanine and other financing transactions in various asset classes.
Our commercial finance lawyers primarily represent financial institutions and other lenders in various types of financings; as set forth above, as well as loan workouts, loan restructuring; and loan sales. In addition, we represent public and private companies, including businesses that are local, regional, national, and international in scope as borrowers in financing transactions. Our borrower clients include businesses at all stages of development, including startup and emerging companies; closely held and family businesses; middle market companies; quasi-public agencies; and non-profit organizations.
We assist clients in all areas of finance, including:
For over 40 years, our Corporate Trust group has partnered with the agency and corporate trust departments of major national banks, trust companies and other financial institutions, counseling them in their roles as indenture trustees, administrative agents, owner trustees, collateral or security agents and escrow agents in a wide variety of performing and defaulted secured and unsecured financing transactions. We routinely work with equity and debt participants across the country and internationally, as well as firms in New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Palo Alto, London and many other cities, in bringing these complex transactions to a successful close, assisting our clients in administering their on-going duties and exercising their rights when defaults occur.
Shipman has extensive experience representing state and local government bond issuers, underwriters, borrowers and trustees in public finance transactions. Our lawyers have over 30 years of experience handling matters for these clients involving the issuance of general obligation and revenue bonds and notes, obligations under Connecticut’s Clean Water Fund Program, including drinking water grants and loans, grants and loans from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development for brownfield and other environmental remediation costs, and grant and loans from the Rural Development division of the United State Department of Agriculture for various municipal projects. In connection with these transactions, we routinely draft and negotiate, among other things, bond, note and other loan agreements and documents, bond offering documents, trust indentures, lease purchase agreements, bond purchase agreements, security agreements, guarantees, swap agreements, letters of credit and reimbursement agreements.
Lawyers in our real estate finance group assist clients with all their financial transactions related to real estate properties, including acquisition, development, financing, and management of real estate assets and commercial properties. Shipman has extensive, diverse experience in real estate law, with more than twenty-five lawyers in our Hartford, Stamford, Manhattan, and New Haven offices who represent clients in all aspects of real estate law including acquisitions, financing, leasing, eminent domain, land use and environmental due diligence. The real estate finance team, intersects as part of the larger finance group and real estate group, possesses sophisticated knowledge, skill and experience in large, multi-jurisdictional, multi-party, structured transactions across the commercial real estate spectrum, and advises a wide variety of clients in financing, investment, acquisition and restructuring transactions secured by real estate.
Our team of experienced attorneys provides comprehensive legal counsel to clients involved in financing renewable energy projects. We offer expertise in a wide range of transactional and regulatory matters, helping our clients navigate the complex landscape of renewable energy finance. We represent clients, including lenders and quasi-governmental agencies, in connection with the financing of solar, wind, fuel cell, and other renewable energy projects, and have extensive expertise in both traditional and back leverage structures. We advise clients with respect to financing residential energy credits and working with tax equity providers, including negotiation of interparty agreements. We review and negotiate complex project documents on behalf of our clients, including power purchase agreements and O&M agreements, and review regulatory approvals.
Our workout, bankruptcy and creditors’ rights team has been involved on behalf of our creditor clients in some of the country’s largest workout, debt restructures and bankruptcy matters, representing creditors in complex and often contentious proceedings around the country. These cases include the bankruptcies of high-profile debtors in the airline, energy, steel, retail, healthcare, telecommunications, bank holding company, and health care industries. Whether it is a routine counseling matter or a complicated national bankruptcy case, our lawyers are positioned to strategize a path to a successful outcome; and are not afraid to advocate aggressively, litigating where necessary, to achieve success for our clients. We welcome the opportunity to help clients navigate seldom-seen bankruptcy issues, and tackle high-risk and high-stakes cases that require unique, sophisticated solutions.
