Banks today are facing the most difficult credit and monetary environment that has been seen for decades. As a result, banks are racing to come up with innovative approaches to traditional lending practices and borrowers are striving to understand and benefit from these changes. This challenging environment calls for a multi-disciplinary approach from lawyers with experience and reach who can work together to find a viable path for both lenders and borrowers.
The multi-faceted nature of banking law today calls for lawyers with the resources to handle just about any commercial financial transaction. Acting as counsel to domestic and foreign chartered banks, trust companies, merchant banks, provincial treasuries, commercial credit grantors, income fund companies, foreign lending institutions and major corporate borrowers, Bennett Jones offers clients a broad spectrum of legal and advisory services geared toward the changing needs and demands of the financial services industry.
We routinely advise on the structuring and documentation of domestic and cross-border loan facilities. Our broad experience and expertise in this area ranges from large, syndicated cash-flow senior debt financings arranged by both domestic and foreign banks to mid-market asset based and senior and mezzanine commercial loan transactions. In recent years, our lawyers have been primary counsel, acting for lenders, sponsors and borrowers, on a number of the largest highly leveraged acquisitions in the Canadian market. We also have broad experience in project finance, public and private debt issues and restructurings.
Our complementary M&A, private equity, capital markets, tax and real estate expertise allow us to deliver to our clients the full spectrum of skills and experience necessary to ensure they are provided with thorough, knowledgeable and timely counsel for all aspects of their lending and other debt financing transactions.
We regularly advise Canadian and foreign financial institutions on the multitude of regulation that is relevant to them, including:
In addition, we have extremely close relationships with a number of senior regulators including those at the Department of Finance and OSFI, FinTrac and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada.