Leasing

Capital-intensive businesses, such as energy, transportation, infrastructure, and telecommunications, require financing mechanisms that involve complex legal, tax, accounting, business and regulatory issues. Orrick’s Leasing Team is a leader in developing and implementing domestic and cross-border leasing structures that address those issues. We are recognized as the top U.S. domestic lessee-side firm in both the energy and transportation sectors, and our cross-border leasing practice offers capabilities under U.S., English, French, German, and Japanese law. We represent taxable and tax-exempt lessees, including municipal and other governmental entities, transit authorities, cooperatives and utilities, as well as lessors, lenders, and credit enhancers in a wide variety of lease structures.

Orrick’s Leasing Team consists of over 40 lawyers located in the U.S. and Europe. A number of of our partners have worked in the leasing area for over 25 years. Our Team is multi-disciplinary, drawing from our Energy & Project Finance, Commercial Finance, Public Finance, Structured Finance, and Tax practices and works with our highly ranked Bankruptcy, and Real Estate Groups to offer the most sophisticated structuring available. This multi-disciplinary approach, combined with our extensive experience with leasing techniques, allows us to tackle the extremely complex issues encountered in leasing transactions effectively and efficiently.

We have represented clients in lease transactions for a wide variety of assets, including:

• major infrastructure facilities, such as electric utility assets, including fossil, hydro and nuclear generating facilities, and transmission lines;
• transit assets (both foreign and domestic, governmental and private), including railcar and bus maintenance facilities, locomotives, passenger and freight cars, light rail vehicles, and buses;
• maritime assets such as cargo vessels, and passenger vessels as well as offshore drilling rigs, containers and port equipment;
• manufacturing facilities, headquarters facilities, convention centers, and sports stadiums; and
• other big ticket items, including automotive and other manufacturing equipment, aircraft (domestic and foreign registrations), mining equipment, and QTE assets.

Our lawyers have structured and implemented billions of dollars in lease transactions, including conventional leveraged leases; operating leases; defeased leases; LILOs; lease-to-service contracts; like-kind-exchanges and double-dip leases; as well as synthetic leases and U.S. cross-border leases involving assets or lessees located in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom; Japanese leveraged and operating leases for U.S. lessees; and French tax leases.

We are heavily involved in structuring, negotiating and documenting all types of lease transactions. When acting for lessees, we have also been significantly involved in the structuring and negotiation of a wide variety of related agreements including letters of credit, swaps, guaranteed investment contracts (GICs), payment undertaking agreements and other defeasance instruments. This experience has enabled us to develop a thorough understanding of the issues important to each party involved in lease transactions.

The Orrick Approach
In addition to providing excellent legal advice, Orrick prides itself on its focus on practical business solutions that serve each client’s best interests. The diverse experience of Orrick lawyers in infrastructure industries is available and focused on tailoring an optimal solution for each client’s goals.

Orrick has developed a strong internal culture and support system to enhance client service. At the interpersonal level, Orrick lawyers interact, electronically and in person, to share informally information on current developments and best practices. Orrick’s physical infrastructure is continually updated to provide lawyers with the best technology support to enable efficient work across our multiple offices. Together, these offer clients excellent and tailored industry support to meet their sophisticated requirements.