Finance & Restructuring

Built to guide clients through their most important transactions.

Pragmatic thinking, broad experience and sophisticated counsel.

Choate clients rely on our Finance & Restructuring team to deliver on their most complex needs in the global financial markets. We assist many of the world’s leading banks, non-bank lenders, and mezzanine investors -- including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Truist Bank, Wells Fargo, John Hancock, JPMorgan, Barings, Citibank, and U.S. Bank -- with everything from complex cash-flow and asset-based lending transactions to heavily-contested restructurings and bankruptcies. Our deep experience allows us to help lenders, borrowers, equity sponsors and other capital providers analyze potential risks and develop both short- and long-term plans best suited for their business goals.

We are highly experienced in the areas of retail financing, sports financing, mezzanine and junior capital, acquisition financing, restructuring and bankruptcy, asset-based lending, healthcare financing, utility financing, and distressed real estate financing.

All of our partners have substantial experience with both transactional finance work and distressed situations. Unlike most competitors, we do not typically transfer responsibility for matters among partners or other lawyers once a default or bankruptcy arises. By keeping the same team in place even through the most difficult times in the loan cycle, we help our clients maximize their recovery.

 

What We Do Best

Retail Financing

Our deals frequently involve the retail sector, where we have one of the largest practices in the country. We serve as lead counsel to lenders in many of the most high-profile consumer products and retail loans and bankruptcies in the world. This includes a broad range of financing transactions for retailers, including multi-tranche and split collateral debt financings, leveraged buyout and leveraged recapitalization transactions and debtor-in-possession financing. 

Sports Financing

Choate has one of the nation’s leading sports financing practices, serving as lead counsel to financial institutions in franchise loans to MLB, the NHL, the NBA, the NFL and MLS teams, special purpose loans to individual leagues and their financing affiliates, and to teams in connection with stadium construction projects, including in Atlanta, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Arlington, Texas, among others.

Mezzanine & Junior Capital

We counsel clients in highly specialized mezzanine debt transactions involving a wide variety of securities and issuers, ranging along the risk/return spectrum from venture capital financing for start-up entities to later-stage equity transactions and transactions for more established private and public companies.

Acquisition Financing

We advise senior, first-lien, mezzanine, and second-lien lenders and equity sponsors and issuers in acquisition and recapitalization financings involving a range of US domestic and international industries. We are particularly strong in the middle market, where our finance and restructuring and private equity teams work together to represent borrowers, lenders and private equity sponsors and venture fund clients in heavily negotiated, complex transactions throughout the capital structure.

Restructuring & Bankruptcy

From troubled public companies and international insolvencies to failed start-ups, we work with debtors, creditors and equity sponsors in high profile and middle-market restructurings and bankruptcies. Our team’s reputation with financial institutions has enhanced our ability to work effectively with distressed companies in the most difficult stages of loan restructurings. We also have deep experience representing buyers and sellers of distressed businesses and assets, either through a §363 sale process in bankruptcy or an out-of-court transaction.

Asset-Based Lending

Our asset-based lending practitioners possess a deep understanding of the industry’s products and practices, in the US and around the world. Our experience includes structuring and executing transactions, working out and restructuring problem credits, and enforcing creditors’ rights in a wide range of industries, including manufacturers, distributors and transportation companies.

Healthcare Financing

We have significant experience representing and counseling healthcare providers, commercial banks, underwriters, and issuers in the capital structures and needs of the ever-evolving healthcare industry.

Utility Financing

We combine our deep focus on finance with decades of experience structuring transactions and counseling issuers and underwriters on finance, 34 Act compliance and taxation matters in the utilities industry. We have specific experience advising issuers and underwriters on public, private and tax-exempt financing transactions for investor-owned, municipal-owned, and member-owned electric, gas and water utilities.

Distressed Real Estate

Our real estate practice works on an interdisciplinary basis with our nationally-recognized Finance and Restructuring team to advise lenders, investors, owners and developers on distressed real estate transactions, including acquisitions and sales, loan workouts and bankruptcy and restructuring strategies. Our practice is national and involves virtually every asset class.

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