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

What you always need to understand before you even start drafting a report

• Why does the underlying transaction matter?
• What questions do you need to ask before starting a report?
• What shouldn't a report do?
• Does one size fit all?

How and why are reports used on finance transactions?

• The use of reports in acquisition finance
• The use of reports in receivables finance
• The use of reports in asset-based lending
• Security reviews
• What you need to understand about the reader and the ultimate reader
• Cash flow lending vs financing the asset - how does this play into report drafting?

Types of report

• The long and the short
• Fatal flaw reports - what's fatal, what’s not?
• Legal opinions
• Other types of reports
• What drives the most value in a report?

Understanding the agreement or other document you are reviewing in context

• Examining the types of agreements or documents that might hit your desk to report on in financing agreements
• Questions you need to ask others before reviewing & reporting
• Questions you need to ask yourself before reviewing & reporting

How do you break down a contract into something you can report on?

• What are financiers truly interested in?
• Where do you start when approaching reviewing a contract/document?
• A checklist of the areas you should always consider when reviewing a contract
• Some handy tips on making light work of more complex agreement/document reviews
• The one thing you should always check at the start of any contract review

How to disseminate information from contracts and documents without regurgitating the whole document

• Disseminating valuable information
• Imagining the reverse term sheet
• What to keep focus on when drafting the report

The difference between reporting on due diligence reports and reporting on the actual underlying contract

• What are you looking for?
• Understanding the purpose and effect of assumptions and qualifications to reports
• Considering whether the report recommendations stack up

How to present information in a report in a way that is valuable and helps the reader identify key issues

• Identifying the news headlines
• When summaries aren't summaries
• What’s the overriding objective?

Reporting on multiple documents

• How do you approach multi-document reports effectively?
• What’s the aim of a multiple-document report?
• What’s your starting point?

The pros and cons of using technology to review and report on contracts

• How can document review tools assist with reporting?
• What are the pros and cons of relying on technology tool reviews?

Please be advised this training course does not constitute legal advice & should not be relied upon as such. Nor can the trainer give legal advice to participants during the sessions

Our 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 banks & financial institutions, asset and receivables financiers, alternative lenders, large and SME corporates, private equity houses, property developers, pension trustees, regulators, government departments, directors and private individuals on a wide range of banking and finance related matters.

These have included UK and international cross-border syndicated, club and bilateral finance transactions with individual values exceeding £5 billion. His experience spans across many specialisms including global loans, investment grade lending, leveraged finance, real estate investment & development finance, asset and receivables finance, bridge finance, private wealth finance, project finance, securitisations, bond issues, social housing finance, trade finance, higher education finance, intragroup lending, director and shareholder loans, guarantee & security packages and netting and cash pooling arrangements in addition to general advisory work. He has also advised on refinancings and restructurings involving complex multi-layered intercreditor arrangements and directors’ duties related issues.

As an English law qualified solicitor, our trainer has worked in private practice at Denton Wilde Sapte (now Dentons), Gowling WLG, Wragge & Co and Cobbetts and he is currently a partner at gunnercooke.

As in-house counsel, he worked for several years at Barclays Bank PLC in their Sales Finance and Trade & Working Capital Finance teams, advising 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 has 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.

During his time at Gowling WLG our trainer worked as PSL Legal Director and provided education, training and advice on complex areas of law across the firm. He was also responsible for risk monitoring and developing and maintaining knowhow, precedents and practice & briefing notes, in addition to assessing, piloting and implementing various legal technology tools.

He has written and delivered banking and finance related and legal training for lawyers and non-lawyers alike of all levels of experience and for several professional associations including the Loan Market Association. Having worked both in private practice and in-house with leadership, sales, relationship, risk, compliance, legal, transaction management, operations and product teams, he understands the obstacles that need to be overcome on transactions and how to get deals over the line successfully. Consequently, his training focuses on providing participants with the essential foundations, commercial awareness and thought processes necessary to manage and run transactions effectively and with minimum risk.

Our trainer writes regularly on banking and finance and legal technology related topics and he sits on the editorial board for Butterworths’ Journal of International Banking and Financial Law. He was also a member of the PSL advisory board for Lexis PSL’s banking and finance module from 2017 to 2023 and has also sat on the ABFA (now UK Finance) legal and technical committee.

He has participated in numerous 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 provided input into several UK Government legislative consultations.

As a mentor, he has helped the development of many lawyers and young professionals and he has also been a member of the law firm panel at Barclays Eagle Labs Legal Tech Hub, London providing help, support and pro-bono advice 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.