Approach
Financial institutions require informed and attentive legal counsel to ensure full regulatory compliance, successful transactions and high quality service for their clients. Your Firm's Financial Institutions Practice Group represents a wide range of financial institutions, taking a leading role in what has become a national market for financial services.
Attorneys
The financial institutions practice relies on the experience and expertise of talented attorneys from throughout the firm, working together to meet the needs of financial clients.
Your Firm is ranked 28th among the top 50 legal advisers for Whole-Institutions Acquisitions nationally, and 8th in the Midwest (2011 edition of SNL Financial's Bank Mergers & Acquisitions Yearbook).
Clients
We maintain a substantial practice among a wide range of financial organizations, including holding companies, banks, savings banks, savings and loans, credit unions, trust companies, mutual funds and insurance companies.
Practice
We are one of the most active firms in the country in mutual to stock conversions and financial institution mergers, acquisitions and reorganizations. We serve as principal securities and corporate counsel for a variety of large and small publicly-traded institutions, and regularly counsel them on a range of methods for accessing capital markets, including secondary equity offerings, the sale of loan participations and loan packages in secondary markets and the creation and marketing of securities and similar instruments collateralized by loan pools. We also have extensive experience in executive compensation and planning issues (including executive employment contracts, development of stock options, bonus, deferred compensation, qualified plans, other forms of compensatory arrangements, noncompetition agreements, and application of Section 280G of the Internal Revenue Code in the context of corporate acquisitions) and in the areas of commercial, consumer and tax credit lending.
In addition to serving individual financial institutions, we have frequently represented clients in connection with legislative and regulatory policy pursuits. In this capacity, members of our Financial Institutions Practice Group are regularly involved in the development of proposed state legislation, testify before state and federal committees and comment on a wide range of federal and state agency rules proposals.
Our practice also encompasses a full range of more traditional regulatory services, including representation before the Federal Reserve Board, Office of the Comptroller of Currency, Office of Thrift Supervision, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Washington DC Department of Financial Institutions. We provide extensive representation to banks, savings and loans, savings banks, insurance companies and their respective holding companies involving compliance with applicable state and federal regulatory requirements.
The firm anticipates continued expansion of this area as we assist our clients in implementing newly acquired powers, complying with increasingly complex state and federal regulation and responding to continuing changes in the financial services industry.