Drafting Effectively - Reports on Contracts & Other Documents in Finance Transactions

Redcliffe’s course trainer is a highly experienced and sought-after lawyer, advisor, educator, mentor and writer. For almost 30 years and across several different industries, he has written and delivered a wide range of bespoke training courses for individuals, businesses, professional associations and educational establishments.

Over a 20-year legal career, he has advised many different firms including banks and financial institutions, asset and receivables financiers, alternative lenders, large and SME corporates, private equity houses, pension trustees, regulators, guarantors and private individuals.

His training covers a wide range of complex UK and international cross-border banking and finance matters; particularly on transactions with individual values over £2 billion. These have included global loans, investment grade lending, leveraged finance acquisitions, real estate investment & development finance, asset and receivables finance, bridge finance, private wealth finance, project finance, securitisations, social housing finance, trade finance, higher education finance, intra-group lending, netting and cash pooling arrangements and general corporate lending transactions. The latter includes cross-border syndicated and club deals. He has also advised on directors’ duties issues, restructurings and complex multi-layered intercreditor arrangements.

Our course trainer completed his formal training and qualified as a banking & finance solicitor in Leeds at Cobbetts LLP in 2005, before moving to London in 2007 to continue his career at Denton Wilde Sapte LLP (now Dentons). Subsequently, he worked with Wragge & Co LLP (now Gowling WLG (UK) LLP).

He moved to an in-house counsel role at Barclays Bank PLC in 2010, working in their Sales Finance and Trade & Working Capital Finance teams. He advised on a wide range of UK and international receivables finance, inventory finance, securitisation and other asset finance matters (including invoice discounting, factoring, recourse and non-recourse financing, selective receivables finance, supply finance and full asset-based lending agreements). He also worked on secondment with the HSBC (UK) Invoice and Equipment Finance legal and business teams, advising on UK and cross-border receivables and asset-based lending transactions, including hire purchase, lease finance and asset purchase finance.

In 2015, he returned to Gowling WLG (UK) LLP, to become a professional support lawyer in their banking & finance team, responsible for education & training, knowhow, implementation of legal technology and providing cross-jurisdictional advice on complex areas of law. He has also written and delivered training for several professional associations including the Loan Market Association and the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA). This includes contract drafting training for finance transactions.

Having worked both in private practice and in-house with leadership, sales, relationship, risk, compliance, legal, transaction management, operations and product teams, this trainer understands the obstacles that need to be overcome in transactions and how to get deals over the line successfully. Consequently, his training focuses on providing students with the essential foundations, commercial awareness and approaches to thinking which are necessary to achieve this.

He sits on an advisory board for a major legal publisher and an advisory panel for a leading international banking and finance journal. He has also sat on the legal & technical committee for ABFA (now UK Finance).

He has participated in many major law reform projects and consultations including the University of Oxford-led Secured Transactions Law Reform project, the City of London Law Society’s Secured Transaction Code project, the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce consultation on crypto-assets, distributed ledger technology and smart contracts and the England & Wales Law Commission’s calls for evidence on smart contracts and digital assets. He has also participated in several UK Government legislative consultations.

As a mentor, he has also worked on the law firm panel at Barclays Eagle Labs Legal Tech Hub, London providing help and support to a wide range of new start-up legal-tech businesses from the UK and overseas.

• What you always need to understand before you even start report drafting
• How and why reports are used on finance transactions
• Understanding the types of reporting and the important differences between them
• Understanding the agreement or other document you are reviewing in the context of the financing
• A framework for breaking down a contract into easier-to-review parts
• How to disseminate information from contracts and documents without regurgitating the whole document
• How to approach analysing due diligence exercise reports
• How to present information in a report in a way that is valuable and that helps the reader identify key issues
• Reporting on multiple documents
• The pros and cons of using technology to review contracts

This training is fully interactive. Exercises and questions will be used during the session to discuss and highlight particular issues and to help aid your understanding. It is not a page-by-page review of a report, but by examining common difficulties, key drafting principles and how contracts and other documents fit together and interplay commercially, it will help you to acquire a set of core key principles that you can apply to draft reports on any finance document. It will help you present information in a way that is of maximum use to the reader.

One of the major reasons we run this training is because reporting on contracts and other documents in finance transactions can be both time-consuming and difficult in practice. Particularly with the frequent time pressures to highlight key commercial risks quickly, clearly and concisely.

We examine key issues encountered during report drafting and look at how to approach writing reports in a way that creates the most value for the report reader.

Our trainer has been working in the legal profession across a wide range of banking and finance disciplines for 20 years including several years in-house and has a unique insight into what makes a report great to read as opposed to really painful to read. The content covered in this session would ordinarily take months if not years of experience to acquire in practice.

Our unique finance transaction report drafting course is aimed at:

• lawyers who are new to drafting reports on finance transactions
• lawyers who want to learn how to approach drafting reports that provide the most value on finance transactions
• lawyers who want to improve their report writing skills and develop a better understanding of how to approach reporting on finance transactions; so that they can provide maximum value to their readers.

With increased pressure on lawyers to provide greater value for money to their clients and time pressures on supervision; understanding how to draft reports effectively is a key part of every banking and finance lawyer’s toolkit.

Reports are often provided on various contracts and agreements on finance transactions to help inform lending decisions, from reports on sale & purchase agreements and shareholder and investment agreements to reports on key commercial contracts and on lease and sub-lease arrangements through to reports on the underlying finance documents.

However, drafting reports that actually help a business make well-informed commercial decisions and which clearly and concisely highlight key areas of risk to those engaging in finance transactions is a difficult skill to acquire and develop.

Furthermore, it is a skill that needs to be taught in context or any detail at the important foundational stages of a legal career. In turn, that can make report writing very challenging with the result potentially being of little value to the reader. Furthermore, if those habits become too ingrained, they can be very difficult to unlearn.

This report drafting for finance documents course will provide the essential foundations that will allow you to examine your report drafting habits and provide you with practical suggestions on how to approach writing reports effectively. So that you can drive the most value out of your reports and help businesses make better-informed commercial decisions.