Jat Bains > Macfarlanes LLP > London, England > Lawyer Profile

The Macfarlanes LLP real estate finance team is a multifaceted team which draws on the firm’s capabilities in the areas of real estate, construction, corporate, and funds teams to provide lenders, alternative lenders, and borrowers with a large range of financing services. Practice head Colin Morgan is a seasoned real estate finance lawyer, praised for his ‘capacity to understand immediately the breadth, ramifications and importance of issues and the consequences of given directions’. Morgan recently acted for a club of lenders led on a high value loan facility to refinance a luxury hotel in London. Other key figures include the ‘commercially minded and solution-focused’ Laura Bretherton, who specialises in financing development projects, and restructuring and insolvency head Jat Bains, a specialist in debt finance work.

The ‘incredibly responsive’ team at Macfarlanes LLP provides ‘solutions-focused and highly technical advice’ to a wide range of creditors, investors, debtors and IPs, primarily on mandates within the domestic market. Funds account for a significant volume of work, including firmwide private equity sponsors eliciting portfolio restructuring mandates as well as credit funds as holders of debt and in a special situation context. Team head Jat Bains is ‘a fountain of knowledge’ on formal insolvency processes, as well as more transactional work in the space, including in the context of distressed M&A and loan-to-own strategies. Paul Keddie is ‘technically brilliant and incredibly responsive’, and provides added insight on restructuring/insolvency matters by dint of his own IP qualification.