Shearman & Sterling has lured a partner with restructuring and financial regulatory expertise from competitor Mayer Brown.
Joel Moss (pictured) advises banks and investment funds on many components of restructurings, such as exit financing, DIP financing, and workouts. Prior to joining Mayer Brown in March 2013, Moss worked as an in-house counsel at Barclays, where his responsibilities included compliance with the Dodd-Frank Act’s “living will” requirements. Living wills, which often run to thousands of pages in length, provide detailed accounts of banks’ assets and operations, and outline what specific actions the institution would take in the event of a wind-down.
“I do resolution planning, and I advise on strategic transactions. So I don’t need necessarily a lot of Chapter 11 work to be relevant and busy. A lot of people who are nimble find ways to stay busy through out-of-court restructurings and the like. The firm is really trying to focus a lot on alternative providers of capital – for example, hedge funds and direct lending private equity firms. They’re looking at that as a way to expand on the bankruptcy side,” Moss told IFLR1000.
Although nearly five years have passed since the Dodd-Frank Act became law, Moss still sees plenty of living will work to be done, particular for the biggest financial institutions.
“The regulators are very focused in this area, they’ve publicly come out and said that they want a lot more detail and analysis. The living will process is always intended to be evolutionary. I can’t predict where living wills will go. I think they’re becoming more and more exacting as each year goes by, because regulators expect continued evolution and progress – contingency planning, more detail, and real hard-core analysis of certain areas. That requires a lot of legal input,” Moss continued.
“The regulators’ demands may vary depending on the size of the institution, and what type of operations there are in US. For example, banks that have broker-dealers and engage in a large number of derivatives transactions may be more scrutinized,” he added.
Although Moss is first and foremost a member of Shearman’s restructuring practice, his hiring continues a trend of expansion on the regulatory side, recent examples of which include recruiting Timothy Byrne from Cleary Gottlieb in October 2014. Byrne, a former staff attorney at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington and a former senior counsel at Merrill Lynch, has advised banks domestically and abroad on regulatory compliance matters. The firm also recently added Reena Agrawal Sahni, another specialist in Dodd-Frank compliance matters and a former SEC lawyer, as a partner based in New York.