Financial Markets Practice
Jay Tambe, Brett Barragate, and Alban Caillemer du Ferrage discuss evolving trends in the financial markets industry and describe how Jones Day has responded to clients' changing needs through the formation of the Firm's Financial Markets Practice.
Read the full transcript below:
Jay Tambe:
With over 300 lawyers, the financial markets practice at Jones Day is a combination of transactional lawyers, regulatory lawyers, and litigators who all speak the same language and serve the same client base.
Brett Barragate:
It was built for our clients. They don't look at their problems by practice group. They have a problem. They need help. They want to be able to go to a law firm or a lawyer and be able to get answers. The goal is to make sure that everybody in the practice has enough knowledge about financial markets, about what our clients need to very quickly get them to the right place within the firm to help them out.
Alban Caillemer du Ferrage:
The strengths of the practice are really the strengths of the firm itself. I would probably name four. A singular client service tradition and long-term engagement, a true global integrated partnership, a very institutional approach to anything we handle for our client and a balanced proportion of transactional and litigation lawyers.
Alban Caillemer du Ferrage:
We don't have a Jones Day clients. We really only have long-term partners. The banking and financial practice of Jones Day has expanded much over the last 10 years. We are now have a full fledged practice, covering capital market, derivatives, general leverage, direct lending, securitization, stricter finance, real estate, project finance and so on, in addition to litigation. So we want to bring that capabilities as well to the corporate client, which we have been serving on the litigation or corporate eminent front, but not so much in the past in banking and finance.
Jay Tambe:
And when a client has a need that spans offices, that spans jurisdictions, we can bring to bear a scale in the legal representation, a sophistication of the substantive legal skills, and all of that is done in a very coordinated and seamless way. It's something that our clients have grown to expect from us. Having the financial markets practice as a single practice makes it stronger and makes that offering stronger for our clients.
Brett Barragate:
The changes in the global financial markets have been the same since the financial crisis. There's a constant tension between this incredibly low interest rate environment, which creates a massive amount of money that's available to clients. They want to invest it, but at the same time, there's a geopolitical situation that is a little unpredictable. It makes it hard for clients to figure out where to put all this money that's available to them.
Alban Caillemer du Ferrage:
Embargos and sanctions becoming a harder environment to navigate with new ambition from the European Union to enforce a broad range of sanction with a new mandate for the European commission, which we call FISMA, a new European blocking statute. And our client will find themselves between a hammer and a hard place with conflicting requirement from the US and the European Union, which we are ideally placed to help them with.
Brett Barragate:
The previous 10 years after the financial crisis we're focused on, well, what are the regulatory changes going to be around the world? How is each country going to adapt to that? I think the next 10 years are going to be all about technology and how is it going to impact the financial markets? There's going to be new participants. There's going to be new regulations. There's going to be new litigation, but it's going to be the most important issue I think for the coming decade.
Jay Tambe:
Technology is completely changing the way the financial markets work. On the one end of the spectrum, you have high-frequency trading that is really possible only because of computing and very, very fast transaction rates. On the other end of the spectrum, it is what consumers are doing with technology every single day. They're using technology to transfer money, to store money, to make investments. So the notion of what a financial institution is, is changing, and our clients are adapting and changing the way they're organized to deal with those technological changes, but they're also dealing with intense competition from non-financial institution players in this space.
Jay Tambe:
And so it really has been a sea change in the financial markets, and it's because of those changes in the financial markets that the firm has adopted and the firm has evolved. And the financial markets practice is really the culmination of our response to all of those changes. We are reorganizing ourselves to serve our clients better given the changes in the financial markets.
