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A Q&A with Solicitor and Head of Lexis®PSL Finance Group, Emma Millington.
I head up the Finance Group at LexisPSL, which comprises of the Banking & Finance, Financial Services and Restructuring & Insolvency teams. I started my legal career at Allen & Overy where I trained and qualified into the derivatives and structured finance team. I then worked at Deutsche Bank on the FX derivatives desk followed by a director role at Credit Agricole CIB working primarily on credit derivatives and structured products. Seven years ago, I joined LexisPSL as the derivatives PSL and during this time I became head of the Banking & Finance team, and just over a year ago was promoted to head of the group.
The Banking & Finance team is made up of a variety of specialist banking and finance lawyers. Each of us have our own focus based on our many years in practice (both private practice and in-house) before joining LexisPSL. Our focus is always on making sure that our content is as useful and accessible to our customers as possible. We have all been in the office in the early hours and working hard to meet tight deadlines, and so we understand how important it is to be able to access information quickly and easily. To that end, we have a raft of checklists and quick guides to help lawyers find answers swiftly, but we also have very detailed notes for when lawyers have more time to read into the law and how to apply it, and need to have a full understanding of the background and how to apply that in practice. We remember what it is like being in stressful situations and so our focus is always on making our content as useful as possible to our customers.
This year, the B&F team have been particularly busy on the divergence that is starting to emerge in the UK as a result of Brexit as well as the implications of the transition away from LIBOR. We also are focused on sustainable finance, with lots of explanatory guides on the different types of sustainable finance and how to document these transactions.
We are conscious that at different stages in your career, you are looking for different types of content and information. In B&F we hope to have content suitable for lawyers across all periods of their career.
(e) All lawyers: we track key industry bodies such as the LMA, ISDA, ICMA and FIA so that you can always be up to speed with what is going on in the market at a glance.
The aim of the team is always to make your day easier and more productive. Everything we do is done with that in mind! If you subscribe to our daily alerts, every morning you will receive an email containing the latest developments in the finance world to keep on top on the multitude of changes, or if you subscribe to our weekly highlights, the B&F team take the daily stories and filter them down to contain the most important stories so that you can focus on the very key stories of the week.
Our trackers and timelines, as mentioned above, will help keep you up to date with specific legal developments such as sustainable finance, LIBOR, industry body developments as well as on the key regulations affecting finance lawyers today.
Having studied law at university, I have always been interested in cases and how case law has shaped and developed the way that the finance world works. My favourite section is our Case tracker and analysis subtopic. Not only do we have a general B&F case tracker so that you can quickly see what cases have recently been published and what their implications are, but we also have a series of practice notes called “Key cases” which set out certain key cases and associated relevant content in relation to certain topics, including important issues such as fixed and floating charges, how finance documents are constructed, assignment, guarantees…and many more! They are a great aide memoir when you know that you have read a case about an issue but can’t remember the parties, or just to get up to speed with how the courts are ruling on certain topics. The first key cases note was for derivatives, because at the time there were so many cases relating to the capacity to enter derivatives cases, that it was easy to forget which case was about each point. Feedback from our customers is that they love these practice notes, both for dipping in to remind themselves on certain cases and for a more informative read to get back up to speed with key cases. Not only do we summarise the cases in these practice notes but we also link up to news analysis that we have commissioned or written on the cases and we also link to our affiliated journal, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law, the leading monthly journal providing practitioners with the very latest on developments in banking and financial law throughout the world.
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