Investment managers like you are faced with an ever-broadening array of products, increasing compliance requirements, and complicated legal structures. What do you need to look for in a law firm?
Whether you’re forming a fund, distributing interests in a fund, or making strategic decisions about the growth of your asset management business, you need attorneys who will approach your needs with not only experience and knowledge but with creativity and enthusiasm. You need attorneys who will craft innovative and tailored solutions when standard approaches don’t suffice. You need attorneys who are commercial and as familiar with both private and public funds as they are with retail alternatives and digital assets and who can be flexible as your investment products evolve for a changing marketplace.
And you need attorneys who understand the nuances inherent in different funds that make one alternative investment fund different from another and that might argue for exploring the use, for example, of private equity funds, venture capital funds, real estate funds, interval funds, tender offer funds, or commodity pools. You need attorneys who can assess all types of investment opportunities, whether they’re private funds, retail funds, managed accounts, REITs, or BDCs—and who understand how these products interact and can complement each other.
You need an investment management team that can collaborate seamlessly with other attorneys at their firm when you need advice in such areas as securities, credit, debt, real estate, infrastructure, commodities, derivatives, and futures, tax, ERISA, M&A, enforcement, and litigation. You need attorneys who are as comfortable working with managers raising money from different types of investors all around the world, who can bring in experts who understand your business and investment strategy regardless of the industry you’re investing in and who have connections throughout those industries that allow them to make impactful introductions. You need attorneys who can help you grow across multiple and creative distribution platforms such as RIA networks, fintech marketplaces, tokenization, and wirehouse distribution channels, as well as other new ventures that may arise.
You need attorneys who can take a proactive and holistic approach when you’re confronting cybersecurity and data privacy matters and who can guide you through compliance and regulatory issues when you’re faced with government investigations or enforcement actions. And you need attorneys who, regardless of a fund’s structure, investment focus, or targeted investors, can work with you at every stage of a fund’s life cycle, bringing in and integrating attorneys within the firm who are experts in not only tax and ERISA but also labor, intellectual property, fintech, energy, and environmental law. You need attorneys who can provide day-to-day operational management at the same time they can highlight legal risks that may have been buried in the documents.
At Alston & Bird, we fulfill all those needs. As a full-service investment management practice, rather than a funds boutique, our nearly 40-person investment management team—with a long history in the industry and backed by the deep subject matter expertise that resides within the rest of our firm—is innovative and collaborative, proactive and interdisciplinary, efficient and comprehensive. We’re in it for the long haul, responding as your needs change, seeking solutions when problems arise, tapping into firm resources as necessary along the way. We work collaboratively in an effort to demonstrate deep subject matter knowledge of your business and the direction you want to take it.
With our unparalleled market intelligence, we can provide you with insight into developing market terms and help create new investment products tied to current market trends, working across every asset class, including office, industrial, retail, and multifamily real estate, energy, hospitality, biopharmaceutical, medical, timber, mortgage, specialty finance, futures and derivatives, crypto and digital assets. We’ve invested in technology and in people with the high-end technological skills to turn that knowledge into strategies for creative investment.
The bottom line: No matter the investment strategy employed by your fund, no matter what asset class it’s in, no matter what it invests in, we have the capabilities and are well-positioned to cover any type of investment in a strategic way.
