The transaction legal team of Aareal Bank comes highly recommended by nominators on the back of a highly qualified legal team of over a dozen international lawyers, its extremely well regarded team head Frederick Schönig and its consistently successful support of the company’s property lending business across more than 20 jurisdictions. Schönig shines some light on the team’s major activities over recent months: ‘The transaction legal team has recently merged with the principal credit legal team, making use of synergies out of a closer cooperation. Further, we are closely following up on any technology developments around our business and have started a first cooperation with a German “legaltech” startup recently, and is responsible for one of the significant digitalisation projects of Aareal Bank’.

The team has also undertaken multiple high-value transactions over the past few years, including debt and lending facilities across Europe for values up to and including €1bn. Schönig sums up the team’s major external challenges of late to be ‘high levels of competition and therefore often higher legal complexity in the structuring of deals which tend to be larger volume cross-border deals, often consisting of special properties such as, for example, hotels’. The team’s performance is appreciated in the market as it ‘is fully committed to meet the timing requirements of the Bank’s clients and thereby safeguards closing speed and execution reliability and stands for a high quality documentation, which is particularly respected by club lenders and syndication partners’.