Paul Hastings

Paul Hastings is a California-based law firm that specialises in finance and alternative finance transactions in London, including high-yield bonds, securitisation, and structured products. The unequivocal practice focuses have fuelled remarkable growth for the London office: in 2024, revenue was estimated to have exceeded $200m, a 40% year-on-year increase. This has turbocharged Paul Hastings’ war chest, which the firm used to go on a hiring spree, bringing more than 20 lateral partners in London in the last two years alone, while growing overall London lawyers headcount by 60% since 2022 to over 200 by 2025. While in recent years, financial restructuring, finance, structured products, and infrastructure have been the growth priorities, according to chair Frank Lopez, the firm’s London office is looking to grow its public M&A team and expand its private equity headcount to prepare for the next wave of activity in the corporate market. Paul Hastings stands out with its top-tier finance platform and expertise in alternative finance transactions. The London team offers a comprehensive suite of debt finance services. These include syndicated loans (where multiple lenders jointly fund a loan), or the issuance of debt on capital markets. The team also specialises in securitisation, i.e. the bundling loan obligations with similar risk levels together for resale, as well as debt refinancing and restructuring. Paul Hastings’ London client base features nearly all major investment banks in the credit space, including US leaders like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Bank of America, as well as their European counterparts such as Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas. The team also advises prominent private credit sponsors such as BlackRock, Apollo, CVC, and ICG on growing their non-bank lending and portfolio acquisition businesses in Europe. Demonstrating its experience with a wide range of lenders and finance products, Paul Hastings’ London team recently advised a group of lenders of two banks, nine credit funds (including Macquarie and Golub), and Singapore’s wealth fund GIC on a £1.1 billion private credit refinancing for Civica, a specialist system and outsourcing company. The finance package involved a term loan, a committed acquisition facility, and a super senior revolving credit facility, all of which were “portable”, meaning that the debt would not be repayable if the company is acquired, even though the risks to lenders change when the private equity owner of the company changes. As lender counsel, Paul Hastings put in place additional lender protections to narrow the scope of this portability feature and ensured, as far as it could, that the debt would only be ported to acquirers of a similar nature and creditworthiness as the existing ower of Civica. Complementing its finance capabilities is the firm’s award-winning restructuring practice, which secured the Corporate Rescue of the Year accolade at the 2024 Turnaround, Restructuring & Insolvency Awards. Led by Mei Lian - one of Financial News’ 100 Most Influential Women in European Finance - the team recently advised on the refinancing of Nova Austral, a Chilean company, through local court-led restructuring proceedings and the implementation of a structured financing solution. Finance may be Paul Hastings’ cornerstone, but the firm is actively strengthening its corporate practice. The transatlantic corporate team has delivered on high-profile mandates, including advising AI company G42 on a $1.5 billion strategic investment by Microsoft. Paul Hastings’ London team has also been originating their own UK-based deals in the banking sector, given their renowned finance expertise. Notable deals included advising the shareholders of The Co-Operative Bank on the £780 million sale to Coventry Building Society, as well as The Bank of London on its potential acquisition of the UK branch of Silicon Valley Bank. The team also advised a fund affiliated with Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Sixth Street on the proposed sale of Kensington Mortgage Company to Barclays Bank UK plc. This transaction fit neatly into Paul Hastings’ securitisation and financial services M&A expertise, as it involved the legal and commercial separation of Kensington from group entities Kayl and KHL, which held £8 billion of securitised assets.