Leonard Lee Podair

Lee represents financial institutions in secured lending and other finance transactions, developing creative solutions that protect clients and still address the concerns of the borrower.

He believes that a financial institution's lawyer must be a consensus-builder, working constructively to reach an agreement with the borrower and borrower's counsel.

Lee employs this approach as he collaborates with clients on a wide variety of finance matters, including acquisition financings, cross-border financings, leveraged recapitalizations, debtor-in-possession financings, unitranche, second lien and mezzanine facilities and fund guaranty facilities for private equity sponsors.

Lee has extensive knowledge of inter-creditor issues (generally, as well as issues that may be applicable to specialized structures, such as unitranche and Term B facilities and receivables securitizations), cross-border financing issues and other areas that impact financings, including bankruptcy law and non-standard collateral issues (e.g., intellectual property and foreign collateral).

In addition to his core secured finance practice, Lee has had the opportunity to work on numerous bankruptcy-related matters, as well as on financial products for some of the Firm's capital markets clients, such as securities repurchase transactions and interest rate swap agreements.

Lee has served on numerous panels for the Practicing Law Institute, the Banking Law Institute, SFNet (f/k/a the Commercial Finance Association) and the Association of Commercial Finance Attorneys. He has also published articles on secured lending and bankruptcy law issues in The New York Law Journal, The Secured Lender and other publications.