Advanced ISDA® Master Agreement Negotiations

At Redcliffe, we take ISDA Master agreement training seriously. As such your trainer is an expert in structured finance, specialising in securitisation, real estate finance, banking, capital markets, derivatives, structured products and financial regulation.

She is a consultant, keynote speaker, business adviser, author and trainer who has practised law for nearly 20 years in the banking & finance industry. She has spent her career advising some of the most prestigious global financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup & Credit Suisse. Her primary role was to manage the legal risk globally across the various businesses within an investment bank. As a trainer, she now designs and leads training workshops for senior lawyers, law firm partners, accountants, bankers and various senior executives.

She has been actively involved in the creation of innovative structured transactions; structuring, drafting and negotiating complex financings, including complex repo facilities, hybrid structured products with multiple embedded derivatives, repackaging, synthetic CLOs and regulatory-driven structured transactions; all types of securitisation transactions and restructuring them; supervision of large scale remediation project involving the mis-selling of interest rate swaps, financial regulatory projects and financial litigation.

Our ISDA negotiations course leader holds a Law LL.B (Hons) degree from University College London (UCL) and has worked in the Finance Know-How team at Clifford Chance. She trained at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP and worked on several award-winning transactions involving repackaging, securitisations and US corporate securities. She practised as a solicitor at Linklaters LLP in Singapore and has also worked in New York and Hong Kong.

Returning to London, she spent around 5 years at Allen & Overy LLP. She advised on a wide range of issues, including; swaps, insolvencies, disclosure matters under the Prospectus Directive, US 144A SEC-registered deals, real estate finance, master trusts, CMBS and RMBS securitisations and Opco/Propco structures for loan securitisations. She was seconded to Credit Suisse to work on the Real Estate Finance trading desk where she worked on loan origination, leverage finance and acquisition finance deals. Later she was seconded to Citibank, where she advised on LMA loans, highly structured real estate finance transactions, risk mitigation and syndication.

In 2007, Redcliffe’s ISDA master agreement course lead moved to Credit Suisse as in-house legal counsel, advising on structured capital markets, derivatives, structured negotiation and structured products including fund-linked products, a range of exotic trades, CDOs, CLOs, repos and other highly structured financing transactions conducted during and after the credit crunch. She structured and documented trades that achieved the required regulatory capital and balance sheet treatment using a combination of techniques such as credit default swaps, call options or unfunded loan participations.

She started working as a specialist consultant in 2009, advising her clients on complex projects involving legal, operational, regulatory and compliance matters on derivatives and structured products.

Our ISDA master agreement training covers the following objectives:

• Review in detail all negotiation clauses of the 2002 ISDA Master Agreement.
• Understand the principal differences between the 1992 and 2002 versions of the ISDA Master Agreement.
• Get a checklist of issues to negotiate along with a detailed review and discussion of the ISDA Schedule including drafting points and European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR)-related amendments.
• Review and discussion of the 1995 Credit Support Annex (CSA) along with the negotiating points and standard market practices.
• Explore the main legal and commercial issues around the ISDA master Netting agreement and Valuations.
• Get a summary of the timeline along with checklists on the steps to follow upon an Event of Default or Termination Event.
• This ISDA master agreement course will sharpen up your drafting and negotiating abilities through participation in the group case study allowing you to apply in practice the concepts/theory covered in this course.

• This is the only ISDA® negotiations course on the market that covers the ISDA Documentation; including a detailed clause-by-clause analysis of the ISDA Master Agreement with a case study and aspects of the Credit Support Annex all in one day as a stand-alone course.
• This is also the only course on the market that covers the comparison between the 1992 and 2002 ISDA Master Agreements.
• The trainer has a rare combination of experience that enables her to cover the legal, commercial, regulatory and structuring aspects of this subject matter.
• The ISDA negotiations course trainer is a lawyer with a background from the magic circle law firms, the bulge bracket investment banks as well as an accountancy practice, hence she comes with a wide array of experience ranging from working on complex innovative transactions to BAU (business as usual) flow work.

Our ISDA® master agreement course is a ‘must know’ for:

• Credit Risk personnel at all levels (Analyst, Associate, Vice President, Director and Managing Director) who need to make credit decisions relating to ISDA Master Agreements.
• In-house legal counsels at any level.
• Private practice lawyers at any level from paralegals, trainees, junior/senior associates, partners and heads of departments involved in or likely to be involved in structuring, documenting, reviewing and negotiating ISDA trades.
• ISDA documentation teams at any level including paralegals, transaction executives, etc.
• ISDA Collateral management teams at any level focussed on margin calls, CSAs, etc.

Our ISDA® negotiations training is ‘nice to know’ for:

• Operations teams at any level that book derivatives trades
• Derivative traders
• Structures
• Accountants who advise on swap transactions
• Compliance personnel involved with ISDA transactions

Our ISDA master agreement training covers pertinent issues related to the drafting, negotiating and understanding of the ISDA Master Agreement. This course is relevant for:

1. Lawyers both in private practice and in-house
2. Asset Managers, Collateral Managers, Traders, Bankers and Structurers involved in transactions involving swaps, CDSs, options, swaptions etc.
3. Operations teams involved with swaps, EMIR reporting etc.
4. ISDA documentation teams who typically draft and negotiate ISDA Master Agreements and trades
5. Accountants who advise clients on swap transactions.

Our ISDA negotiator training covers ISDA documentation framework. A detailed clause-by-clause analysis is then undertaken of the 2002 ISDA Master Agreement followed by a comparative analysis between the 1992 and the 2002 ISDA Master Agreements. We will undertake a detailed analysis of the ISDA Schedule, including any EMIR-Regulation-related language. The key market negotiation points relevant to negotiating an ISDA Master Agreement will be covered including the questions to ask depending on who you represent.

We will discuss the Credit Support Annex (“CSA”) and the ancillary ISDA documentation. We will go through in detail the settlement netting and close-out netting and the calculations involved, including how swaps are valued. We will cover the Events of Default and Termination Events operative provisions, procedural timelines and checklists outlining the notice requirements, legal, commercial and operational points to tick off the list. ISDA negotiations training also covers case law and amendments to the ISDA Master Agreement.

There will be an Interactive Group Case Study involving the documentation of an ISDA Schedule and the key issues to consider. PARTICIPANTS ARE REQUIRED TO BRING THEIR OWN COPIES OF THE 2002 ISDA MASTER AGREEMENT AND THE ACCOMPANYING ISDA SCHEDULE.