Our Investment Funds and Products group works with the firm's highly rated Alternative Funds practice, which comprises more than 30 partners dealing with the formation, marketing and investment of private equity, hedge, real estate and media funds as well as listed vehicles such as investment trusts and VCTs.
As the range of fund products around the world increases in number and sophistication, so do the opportunities for listing and quotation. Through years of familiarity with the alternative investment funds market SJ Berwin’s partners and associates have acquired not just legal knowledge, but extensive awareness of novelties in the design and marketing of funds and structures, tax planning opportunities and sometimes scope for regulatory avoidance.
Our Investment Funds and Products group works with our clients on product design to achieve the best structure for tax and regulatory as well as commercial purposes, from the original concept through to setting up and closing the fund. We liaise with the client’s other advisers (accountants, placing agents, intermediaries, overseas counsel), and typically project-manage the fund documentation and the closing/launch process.
We also advise on the regulatory aspects of the formation and promotion of funds. If the client is seeking to offer a fund worldwide, we will orchestrate the necessary marketing survey of the applicable law in relevant jurisdictions. Generally this means building and updating generic data and ensuring that requisite selling legends are appended to the fund offering material; in certain cases, overseas counsel will need to review the marketing documentation, and we will take care to manage this process to ensure that the costs remain competitive.
Our service in relation to fund marketing (and, more generally, marketing of investment products and services) across the world has made SJ Berwin the firm for this sort of advice, whether the client seeking it is a fund manager/general partner, a placing agent or investment bank, or an overseas law firm gathering information for use with its own client base.
Our advice also covers the regulation of managers, trustees/depositaries, advisers and other service providers to the many different sorts of investment fund we encounter.
There is a natural overlap between the technology employed in structuring a hedge fund and that employed in other types of derivative investment vehicle or structured product. We have flexibility and experience to structure hybrid funds and similar cutting edge products. We have learned to be sensitive to the increasing commercial convergence between the activities of private equity, real estate and hedge fund managers, and to look for solutions to allow certain specialist funds to be promoted to individual as well as institutional investors.