Structured Finance

Structured finance continues to evolve as markets diversify and asset classes evolve, challenging market participants to rethink how they manage liquidity, extract value from their balance sheets, and tap into alternative capital sources. Success requires more than transactional support; it demands strategic insight, inventive thinking, and solutions that both adapt across credit cycles and address investor, regulatory, and rating agency requirements.

How We Help

Seyfarth’s Structured Finance group brings together a cross-office team of finance lawyers with extensive experience in structured products, asset securitization, and derivatives transactions. Our group combines market fluency, technical depth, and business pragmatism. We leverage our strength across tax, securities, derivatives, real estate, bankruptcy, regulatory, and specialized industries, to provide clients with integrated counsel that anticipates the full life cycle of a transaction. We don’t just structure deals—we engineer solutions that stand up to complexity and deliver lasting value.

We represent leading global financial institutions, investment managers, private equity, banks, asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies, fintech lenders, and corporates seeking innovative financing solutions. Our understanding of the commercial objectives of our clients and how they evaluate and manage risk enables us to deliver strategies and outcomes that are aligned with their objectives.

Our market-leading team brings decades of experience across thousands of transactions worth hundreds of billions of market value. Our team represents advisors, arrangers, borrowers, and issuers in securitizations of every asset class (from traditional asset classes through to the most esoteric). We represent clients in project and acquisition financing, syndicated and bilateral loans, capital raising, and portfolio acquisitions of performing and nonperforming loans. Our team structures trade and supply-chain platforms, joint ventures, and liquidity-optimization programs. We work seamlessly across the US, Asia, Europe, South America, and the Middle East, delivering cross-border, business-focused financing solutions.

Our Services

Structured Warehouse & Term Securitizations. We advise issuers, underwriters, investors, servicers, trustees, custodians, lenders, and credit enhancement providers on the full range of term securitizations—public, private, and Rule 144A—covering deal documents, complex structuring, servicing and trust agreements, underwriting, consents, and derivatives across a range of asset classes from mortgages and auto loans to equipment leases and transportation assets. Combining industry insight with multidisciplinary experience, we structure asset-backed facilities, guide acquisitions, and manage distressed assets to help clients meet commercial goals, regulatory demands, and long-term operational needs.

Transportation Finance. We advise lenders, investors, operators, and sponsors on aviation, rail, shipping, and infrastructure transactions, including leasing, structured finance, securitization, and private equity. From buying and selling transportation assets and corporate owners, joint-venture asset origination structures, warehouse facilities, and term securitizations, we cover the full spectrum of transportation asset transactions, with particular expertise in aviation and rail. 

Trade & Supply Chain. We represent major US and international banks, private equity participants, and corporate buyers and suppliers in trade receivables and supply chain finance transactions, including invoice and draft programs, buyer- and supplier-led structures, and third-party or tech-based platforms. Leveraging securitization and true-sale expertise, we structure cross-border facilities, often with credit insurance, credit support, or risk-participation arrangements.

Commercial Paper. We represent US and international bank sponsors of commercial paper conduits, creating and restructuring asset- and loan-backed programs across asset types ranging from receivables and equipment leases to auto, mortgage, franchise, health care, and SBA loans, and representing such sponsors in asset-backed financings funded by such programs.  

Derivatives. We represent issuers and other market participants in structuring, negotiating, collateralizing, and executing over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives to stabilize cash flows and manage risks in securitizations without altering asset pools. We assist parties in synthetically replicating ownership and synthetic risk transfers, and handle OTC and exchange-traded derivatives in multiple categories as well as counterparty, collateral, and legal risks and complexities which must be rigorously managed in structured finance documentation. 

CMBS. We represent issuers, underwriters, loan sellers, servicers, and B-piece buyers in CMBS securitizations—including conduit, SASB, CLOs, and Freddie Mac K-Series. We also handle securities sales, workouts, foreclosures, asset management, and servicing transfers.

CLO/CDO/CBO/CFO. We represent arrangers, issuers, collateral managers, warehouse lenders, investors, servicers, collateral agents, collateral administrators, and trustees in CLO and CFO transactions backed by broadly syndicated, middle-market, CRE, and mezzanine loans. Our team also pioneered capitalized management vehicle structures, helping ABS managers meet US, UK, and EU risk-retention requirements and finance majority-owned affiliates.

Consumer and Esoteric Assets. We represent both borrowers and lenders in financings backed by a variety of consumer assets, including credit card receivables, student loans, residential mortgage loans, home equity loans and lines of credit and personal loans, and represent sponsors in origination programs for such assets, directly or through associated bank lenders.

The Seyfarth Advantage

Our practice combines market fluency, technical depth, and business pragmatism. We leverage Seyfarth’s strength across derivatives, real estate finance, corporate, tax, ERISA, and restructuring, providing clients with integrated counsel that manages and anticipates the full life cycle of a transaction.