Paul Hastings has hired two fund finance teams from Haynes Boone and Cadwalder Wickersham & Shaft to launch in Charlotte.
The incoming teams include Haynes Boone partners Holly Loftis, Aleksandra Kopec and Mark Nesdill and Cadwalader’s Danyeale Chung. The move reunites Loftis and Chung, who previously practised together at Cadwalader.
Loftis and Chung support lender-side fund finance clients on structuring, negotiation and documentation related to credit facilities and other secured and unsecured lending arrangements, including management fee lines, GP lines, employee co-invest loans and hybrid financings.
Kopec supports both lenders and borrowers across a rage of fund finance matters, including subscription line credit facilities, NAV facilities and partner loan programmes and acquisition financings, while Nesdill advises on fund-level financings and bespoke fund-finance adjacent matters.
Paul Hastings chair Frank Lopez said: “With premier talent, like Holly and Danyeale and the broader teams from two of the top fund finance practices, Paul Hastings is primed to expand with existing clients by taking market share in the growing $1.2trn fund finance market, which is anticipated to more than double to over $2.5trn by 2030.”
Loftis joins after just over four years as a partner at Haynes Boone, having previously spent six years at Cadwalader. She started her legal career at Mayer Brown in 2010.
Kopec arrives after just under three years at Haynes Boone. She previously worked at King & Spalding for more than eight years, just over a year of them as a partner. Prior to that she spent seven years at Clifford Chance.
Nesdill followed the same path as Loftis, joining Haynes Boone from Cadwalader, where he started his legal career in 2017.
Chung joins after more than a decade at Cadwalader, becoming a partner at the start of 2023. She previously spent nine months as a contract attorney at Mayer Brown, also alongside Loftis.
Loftis said: “The opportunity to reunite with Danyeale and team up with Eric [Schwitzer], assemble an all-star roster of skilled fund finance lawyers and drop this new team into a global finance practice that is Band 1-ranked in banking and finance, private credit and capital markets was too compelling for us to pass up.”
The Charlotte office opening is the firm’s 14th in the US, according to its website.
Commenting on the new office, Lopez added: “Charlotte is a financial services hub and the home to many of our leading banks and asset manager clients as well as Fortune 500 companies from other sectors.”
Other US firms have also opened in Charlotte recently including Proskauer Rose, which added a quartet of finance partners from Cadwalader last September.
Commenting on Loftis, Kopec and Nesdill’s departures, Haynes Boone’s global fund finance head Albert Tan said: “Haynes Boone has built one of the most respected fund finance practices in the world, and we continue to lead the market, as evidenced by the interest our attorneys are garnering. We forge ahead in growth mode and are strategically adding talent to help our clients navigate the dynamic fund finance market. Haynes Boone thanks the departing attorneys for their contributions and we extend our best wishes to them.”
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