Paul Hastings won the “ESG Law Firm of the Year” award at Secured Credit Investor’s (SCI) inaugural ESG Securitisation Awards 2023 for its deep experience in the ESG field and its pioneering work to incorporate ESG factors into securitisation transactions.

SCI noted that Paul Hastings has worked with a range of high-profile clients active in the structured finance space over the years, such as LiveMore Capital, a sustainable lender founded with a social mission to provide mortgage finance for people in later life, and Kensington Mortgages, a UK lender that issued the UK’s first green residential mortgage backed securitisation (“RMBS”) and the UK’s first social RMBS. Paul Hastings has also been at the forefront of ESG developments impacting European CLOs. Most notably, Paul Hastings helped the CLO market make a step-change in its approach to ESG, with the Fidelity Grand Harbor 2021-1 deal.

On how ESG factors have become increasingly part of the daily workflow of investors and CLO managers, Paul Hastings partner Blake Jones commented, “2022 saw the tightening and expansion of ESG exclusion lists, with a number of investors now having expanded the criteria to be included in exclusions lists and developing more sophisticated house positions on the assets to be excluded.”

Related to the firms work with LiveMore Capital, Paul Hasting partners Paul Severs and Victoria Morton noted that people in later life are too often underserved by high street lenders. Ms. Morton commented, “This has been particularly material for clients that are earlier in the life cycle of their origination platform, where there is considerable scope for advice relating to the establishment of an ESG framework for reporting and tracking mortgage loans.”

The SCI ESG Securitisation Awards recognize the pioneers in the European ESG securitisation market.

About Paul Hastings

With widely recognized elite teams in finance, mergers & acquisitions, private equity, restructuring and special situations, litigation, employment and real estate, Paul Hastings is a premier law firm providing superior intellectual capital and execution globally to the world’s leading investment banks, asset managers and corporations.