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8 February 2013

Eighty lawyers work in the project finance group full time, giving Chadbourne one of the deepest benches in the project finance market of any law firm in the world. The group operates as a large team with lots of specialists in different types of contracts and financing strategies. Chadbourne distributes a publication called the Project Finance NewsWire to 29,000 people. It holds an annual conference for industry leaders. It also hosts workshops and roundtable discussions during the year on topical subjects.

Chadbourne’s project finance practice gets results, and those results are recognised by leading publications and directories. The prestigious Chambers global directory calls Chadbourne ‘arguably the preeminent US power group’ and ranks it in the handful of top-tier firms working in the market based on peer reviews and year-round polling of corporate law departments.

The firm is particularly well known for its expertise in a number of areas.

It played a prominent role in the birth of the independent power industry in the US, litigating against utilities in two dozen states to open markets and taking one case to the US Supreme Court to confirm the enforceability of the US statutory scheme to promote independent power. Chadbourne established itself early on as a premier developer’s counsel. It continues to work heavily on the developer side of the business, but over time lenders, equity investors and investment banks have also turned to it as counsel.

Chadbourne has traditionally been viewed as a premier developer’s counsel. In the last decade, it has also been asked by equity investors and lenders who have seen Chadbourne across the table on deals to represent them. The firm’s client base today is roughly 60 per cent developers and 40 per cent lenders and equity investors. More than 60 per cent of the work by the project finance group in each of the last five years has been on wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, hydroelectric, fuel cell and other renewable energy projects. Chadbourne works in some capacity for most of the major wind and solar companies active in the US market. It worked on more than a third of the installed wind capacity in the US.

Chadbourne has long experience with projects in developing countries. It is tapped regularly by the multilateral lending and export credit agencies that are the first to provide financing in such markets. It has had a prominent role in projects in Latin America, Africa, eastern Europe, central and south Asia and China. Its lawyers include some of the world’s leading experts in political risk insurance and export credit and loan guarantees.

The firm has also made a heavy investment in work on toll roads and other public infrastructure projects. It has been involved in such geographically diverse projects as the Cross-Israel Highway, the Miami port tunnel project, the airport privatisation in Puerto Rico, ports in Mozambique and Colombia, the Tel Aviv Metro and the Siberian railway.

Finally, Chadbourne has played a pioneering role in privatisations of the electricity industry and privately financed infrastructure projects throughout Latin America, Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries, central Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. It has also helped to structure the evolving independent power industries in such countries as Russia, Uzbekistan, Poland, Armenia, Israel, Mexico, China and Korea.

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