Banking

As the banking industry has experienced dramatic change and consolidation in recent years, the demands on a bank’s legal partners have expanded and grown more complex. A keen understanding of both service-related considerations and corporate-level strategic and business issues enable us to provide clear, insightful and experienced counsel.

Smith Anderson has maintained a leading banking practice in North Carolina, representing banks in transactions and regulatory affairs. As North Carolina’s banking industry has grown, our banking practice has grown as well. Our experience includes bank formation, mergers, the capital markets, lending and workouts, as well as specific industry knowledge in many areas.

Primary Services:

• Secured and unsecured bank lending
  
• Private placements and exempt offerings
• Securitizations and other asset-based financings
  
• International trade finance
  
• Venture and mezzanine investments
• Bank mergers and acquisitions
  
• Commercial paper
  
• Leveraged buyouts and acquisition financing
  
• Letters of credit
• Workouts and reorganizations
  
• Derivatives
• Deposit insurance
  
• Commercial real estate
  
• Organization of insurance subsidiaries
  
• Conduit financing

Additional Services:
he banking law group is part of the firm's larger finance and commercial practice, which also includes corporate, bankruptcy, real estate and environmental law. When appropriate, the banking law group also directs clients to Smith Anderson's other substantial resources, including our securities and growth companies group for public offerings and securities matters, and full-service litigation, tax and employment law groups.

Our Clients:
Our banking law group includes among its regular clients both banks and other financial institutions. We represent the capital markets subsidiaries of many of those institutions, as well as the banks or bank holding companies themselves. We have developed specialized experience in financing, among others, the pharmaceutical, technology, communications, healthcare and utilities industries.

Our Lawyers:
Lawyers in the banking law group have served as chairman of the Business Law Section of the North Carolina Bar Association and many partners in the group have decades of experience in banking matters. In recent years the banking law group also has added several lawyers with significant prior banking and capital markets experience representing money center banks in New York and other financial markets.