Banks and Investment Banks
O’Melveny’s value proposition for bank clients is its ability to provide comprehensive counseling on a global basis. Our platform is comprised of deep and experienced teams of bank-focused lawyers in major financial centers on both coasts of the United States as well as in Asia and Europe—allowing us to support investment banking and proprietary trading activity, tackle major litigation and enforcement matters, and advise on complex, multi-jurisdictional regulatory issues in the most important markets in which our clients do business. It is this ability to field strong offerings in multiple segments in multiple geographies that has made us the outside counsel of choice for many global banks, and that prompted the American Lawyer Media to describe us as a “go to firm” for financial services companies.
Our track record for handling “bet the bank” litigation is unmatched. Recent years have seen our litigators take on—and win—some of the industry’s most important cases involving mortgages (subprime and otherwise), securities class actions, allegations of consumer fraud, overdraft and late fee practices, consumer finance, document retention, “cash sweep” programs, and other bank-specific business practices, in the United States and internationally. Chambers and Partners describes our team as a “talented group” and “a strong choice for complex commercial litigation and multijurisdictional disputes.”
Our ability to advocate for bank clients in complex litigation is supported in large part by our deep understanding of the myriad regulatory regimes that govern the business practices of our clients. Our team features lawyers who boast decades of service in government—lawyers whose experience acting as federal prosecutors, as senior officials within the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and in various other relevant regulatory positions is brought to bear for clients in navigating complex regulations, in responding to inquiries from the SEC, FINRA, Congress, and federal and state criminal prosecutors, and in extracting positive outcomes from challenging compliance- and enforcement-related situations.
As the landscape for investment banking has gone global, clients have increasingly turned to our transactional lawyers to advise on underwriting, M&A, corporate finance and lending, distressed investments and restructurings, and principal area trading. We are able to offer clients a compelling combination of national and international reach without sacrificing sophistication or efficiency—our robust capital markets team raised more than US$28 billion in 2012 alone, helping issuers access public markets in the US, Hong Kong, China, India, and the UK.