Restructuring and Special Situations

Businesses continually face challenges, including adverse liquidity movements, regulatory upheaval, depressed investor sentiment and other unexpected scenarios. We work with businesses and investors to promote operational continuity and create a platform for future growth.

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Unfavourable situations can force owners, issuers, borrowers, boards and creditors to re-evaluate their positions. Early restructuring solutions can help avoid financial distress further down the line, while strong contingency plans will often provide protection to businesses when consensual solutions become unworkable.

Today’s cross-border business restructuring and special situations work calls for lawyers skilled in providing bold and commercial solutions. Sharp technical skills are essential to guiding clients through the complexities of the market.

Our extensive experience ranges from supporting businesses in the early phases of liability management programs, upsizings, and refinancings. Many situations can be remedied if caught early. We also have the capability to support more material adjustments to capital structures and operational issues, using in or out-of-court processes where appropriate.

Our restructuring and special situations (RSS) lawyers advise all stakeholders in restructuring cases. Through our global platform we advise creditors, investors, and multinational companies. We also advise pension trustees, governmental and quasi-governmental bodies, stressed financial institutions, and insolvency officeholders. We have an exceptionally broad client base and our firsthand experience with a range of stakeholders allows us to bring an insightful and authoritative perspective to new situations.

We offer exceptional geographic reach, supporting businesses across the globe through our worldwide team, which includes dedicated groups in the key global financing hubs of New York, London and Hong Kong, in addition to other key jurisdictions across Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.

We can build teams to match your needs. Along with our core restructuring group, we can draw on lawyers from other practice areas including capital markets, litigation, real estate, employment, intellectual property, tax, and pensions. Our holistic approach allows us to advise on all issues that arise in restructurings and distressed situations.

Fund Investment

Debtor Representations

Creditor Representations

Distressed M&A

Distressed Debt Transactions

Liability Management Exercises

Structural Optimization

Sovereigns

Corporate groups are not constrained by jurisdictional boundaries, and neither are we. Our geographical reach across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and beyond allows us to support our clients everywhere. Insolvency processes often begin in a company's home jurisdiction but need to be recognized elsewhere. Our teams are experienced in obtaining recognition and in working with insolvency practitioners around the world.

Understanding local markets, while maintaining a global perspective is key. We can use our local and international skills to guide your restructuring or insolvency planning so that you can take advantage of the process that is best suited to your needs.

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We regularly advise on new money investment to support and rescue businesses in distress. Our experience across the capital structure - and knowledge of key options - positions us to understand how to manage and navigate the risks and rewards of investing in distressed situations.

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A company that becomes financially distressed needs support from advisors that recognize the primary issues at play and can formulate the right path forward.

Whether it is drafting employee incentive schemes to maintain morale, agreeing to new payment terms with suppliers and customers, or negotiating amendments to existing credit facilities, we are renowned for our collaborative, pragmatic, and solutions-based approach and our exceptional commitment to clients.

Our geographical reach and our full-service offering in many jurisdictions mean that we can support our clients wherever they are and be fully attuned to their needs.

Complex debt structures and diverse creditor groups have made navigating the debt restructuring arena even more challenging than ever. Often, it is difficult to identify how any value can be returned to the creditors.

We advise creditors at all levels of the debt structure. Our lawyers have strong practical experience of the technical and commercial issues facing all stakeholders, including the drivers for their decisions in a restructuring situation. We use our negotiating skills to keep parties talking and our pragmatic advice gets results for clients.

Our M&A, and Restructuring and Special Situations teams have worked together extensively on distressed M&A transactions. This collaborative approach allows us to offer sophisticated, coordinated support on behalf of financial and strategic buyers of, and investors in, distressed M&A assets. Clients engage our team to help navigate the complex journey of acquiring troubled assets. We understand the unique combination of business, regulatory, and legal challenges that arise in these transactions, both inside and outside of insolvency proceedings.

Across industry sectors, we provide our clients with a team oriented, collaborative approach that offers a full spectrum of legal services necessary for executing restructuring transactions, including debt finance, labor and employment, tax, antitrust, environmental, intellectual property, real estate, and employee benefits.

Debt trading is now a common feature of developed loan markets. Advising both buy-side and sell-side, we are experienced in using both the Loan Market Association (LMA) and Loan Syndications and Trading Association (LSTA) forms of trade and sub-participation agreements, along with more bespoke trade documents.

On loan portfolio transactions we understand the seller's need to achieve a clean exit and the purchaser's need to understand the assets being acquired. We work with clients on the due diligence processes and on structuring and documenting the sale process, as well as any ongoing transitional services requirements.

Debt trading is a tool that can offer opportunities to market players and we are ideally positioned to support you in this area.

Over the past two decades, the market has seen a significant shift from public to private equity funds, as well as a notable trend in workouts involving private debt and high yield debt.

This market shift - in combination with an increase in risk thresholds, loose (or even completely absent) financial covenants in many private credit and high yield documents, and the flexibility embedded in private credit and high yield covenants - has led to a greater percentage of non-bankruptcy resolutions than ever before.

Our team has an exceptional record in guiding organizations through these out-of-court restructurings and workouts, seamlessly working with other departments to deliver optimal outcomes. We bring together a highly experienced team of debt finance, capital markets and restructuring lawyers to get outstanding results, even in the most complex cases.

Many businesses - including large automotive, chemical, industrial, and minerals companies – face unwanted mass tort exposure from their historical or current operations. Simultaneously, the tort bar representing plaintiffs has become more coordinated and sophisticated in their approach, developing many new tortious products.

Litigating those liabilities is often an option for businesses, but there are other strategic measures that can be taken to isolate and ultimately remove them. This can help to protect key assets and clean up balance sheets, guarding and promoting share value. More specifically, without regularly reviewing, sanitizing or optimizing their businesses, organizations can open themselves up to liabilities that cross-contaminate what might otherwise be distinct operations. When dealt with proactively, liabilities can be minimized or potentially avoided altogether.

Our RSS team is actively involved in leading or collaborating with multidisciplinary groups of lawyers to support companies in exploring the options to minimize exposure to large scale, known and unknown tort liabilities. Through the process of structural optimization, we can help you to isolate an exposure, stop it from tainting the rest of the business, and potentially remove the problem altogether via disaffiliation.

Sovereigns and sub-sovereigns around the world face a raft of economic, social, and political challenges. For many sovereigns and sub-sovereigns, these challenges are heightened by trade volatility, supply chain turbulence, plummeting tax revenues, regime changes, regulatory reforms, and maturing debt. To navigate these challenges, we can bring sophisticated and experienced counsel that is founded on local, regional and international knowledge and an understanding of cultural nuances.

Our lawyers have extensive experience advising sovereigns, sub-sovereign, and quasi-sovereign entities on all types of finance matters, including debt and equity offerings, project financings, bank financings, and domestic and cross-border restructurings. We have a keen understanding of the issues facing low income and emerging sovereigns, sub-sovereign and quasi-sovereign entities in times of uncertainty. We know the implications for sovereign entities and the approaches that can mitigate and solve these challenges.

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Hear from our clients and industry leaders

Hogan Lovells are very solution-oriented and commercial. They provide excellent communication throughout the process and are available 24/7.

Chambers Global 2025 (client quote)

They are technically astute, commercial in their approach and very client-focused.

Chambers Global 2025 (client quote)

The team at this law firm have huge intellectual capability and know how to handle the most complex and cutting-edge restructurings. You can rely on their clear and commercially-minded advice.

Chambers UK 2025 (client quote)

The team at Hogan Lovells understands the nuances of complex restructurings. They are able to navigate thorny issues with skill.

Chambers USA 2025 (client quote)

They are incredibly easy to work with and understand the commercial nuances in every instance.

Chambers Greater China 2025 (client quote)

Hogan Lovells is always very responsive and quick to turn things around. It is very well-equipped to deal with large international and national counterparties and complected matters.

Chambers Asia-Pacific 2025, Singapore (client quote)

The lawyers have tremendous amounts of experience and offer great advice to help guide us through the restructuring process.

Chambers USA 2025 (client quote)

The Hogan Lovells team proactively and commercially leads clients through restructurings. Its ability to run multiple high-profile mandates at pace is impressive.

Chambers UK 2025 (client quote)

Key contacts

Tom Astle

Partner

Tom Astle

Partner

London

Ronald J. Silverman

Partner

Ronald J. Silverman

Partner

New York

Jonathan Leitch

Partner

Jonathan Leitch

Partner

Hong Kong

Philippe Druon

Partner

Philippe Druon

Partner

Paris

Meet the Restructuring and Special Situations team

Representative experience

A debt fund providing €1.2bn of exit financing to the Fortenova group following the restructuring of its €6bn debt stack (following on from our prior roles for the ad hoc bondholder committee, and then debtor-in-possession (DIP) lenders, on that restructuring).

The administrators on the special administration of investment bank Sova Capital, a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulated London-based institution with approximately US$3bn in assets under management (AUM).

The bondholders in relation to the restructuring of the US$500m notes issued by GCL New Energy Holdings Limited, one of the leading solar power operating Hong Kong-listed companies in China.

Nextstone Capital and Mat Immo Beaune, which together form Concert'O, in their capacity as Orpea shareholders, on Orpea's financial restructuring.

An ad hoc group of bondholders in relation to a convertible bond issued by Novaland, one of Vietnam’s largest real estate developers, which is in the process of restructuring certain financial obligations.

Represented several major banks with an approximately €1.7bn exposure and secured a consensual solution involving enhanced economics and an amended plan to account for our client's position.

3F Holding on a restructuring offer for Casino Guichard Perrachon, involving a new money injection of €900m and a debt-to-equity swap of circa €3bn.

Advised the ad hoc bondholder committee holding the majority of circa US$1bn New York law bonds issued by the Luxembourg holding company of Atento, the Latin America business, on a restructuring using a United Kingdom (UK) restructuring plan.

An ad hoc group of 2026 noteholders of Naftogaz, the largest state-owned national oil and gas company of Ukraine, on the amendment and extension of its US$500m Eurobonds.

The Government of Ghana on the reprofiling of more than US$50bn of domestic and international sovereign debt.

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Restructuring and Special Situations

Businesses continually face challenges, including adverse liquidity movements, regulatory upheaval, depressed investor sentiment and other unexpected scenarios. We work with businesses and investors to promote operational continuity and create a platform for future growth.

Explore our capabilities