Press Release: Fox Legal Training launches comprehensive legal training model
March 5, 2025
London 5thMarch 2025 – Legal complexity in the leveraged finance (levfin) market has reached unprecedented levels, creating new risks for lenders and the market as a whole. To address these growing risks, Fox Legal Training (FLT) today launches a free-to-the-market course and series of webinars for credit analysts, risk & compliance officers, in-house counsel, arrangers, borrowers and their advisors to help them master legal risks and understand contracts in a new world of complexity.
FLT founder Sabrina Fox said: “For over two years since launching FLT, I have spoken with hundreds of professionals about the issue of embedded complexity in legal documentation and came to understand the main issue – finance contracts are shrouded in mystery and relegated to the lawyers. Our new resources bust the myth that legals are only for the lawyers and prove that anyone can master contract analysis. Indeed, in this era of embedded complexity, for the sake of the future of the market, everyone must master these skills.”
The ‘Framework for Lending Risk Analysis’ provides a big-picture approach to demystify contracts and overcome psychological barriers, helping professionals take their first steps in mastering legal documents. It serves as a gateway to FLT’s flagship Leveraged Finance Covenant Training course, designed to deepen contract analysis and negotiation expertise.
FLT’s new Knowledge Series of webinars will be hosted biweekly and are designed to bridge the gap between credit risk and legal risk, demonstrating through real-life case studies the ubiquitous nature of legal risks.
These new resources are launched alongside FLT’s existing suite of tailored training courses for the levfin market. After two and a half years of engagement with market participants and observation of legal trends in the credit market, Fox discovered that the key impediment to truly addressing ever-growing legal risks was amental block to reading finance contracts.
Over the past two decades and particularly since the Global Financial Crisis, levfin contracts have become looser and more complex, giving borrowers more flexibility, and therefore more options, than ever before, and presenting lenders with greater legal risks, new responsibilities, downside (and potential upside) around documentation.
Most credit professionals have not been trained to navigate the complex documents that are demanding more of their time as levels of distressed assets and defaults rise, and borrowers exercise options to delay repayments, prime existing lenders and divert value away from the credit group. There is a growing confidence crisis around understanding contracts, with more outsourcing to law firms which is hampering the ability of lenders to manage large portfolios effectively, and to act quickly when required.
Fox added: “Our educational institutions are picking up on this issue – I have been asked to speak on levfin contract risk at King’s College and IESE and fully expect that levfin legal risks will become an integral part of educating the credit analyst teams of tomorrow, with contract analysis viewed as just as essential a skill as financial statement analysis.”
Fox is a seasoned levfin expert with two decades of experience advising on legal risks from both the lender and borrower perspectives. Her deep market knowledge has informed a unique training model applicable across broadly syndicated loans, high yield bonds and private credit, whether in the U.S., Europe or Asia, that connects directly with the needs of credit professionals and empowers them to think like lawyers, guiding students through contracts step-by-step and addressing real-world legal risks in their roles.
FLT is designed to fit into the demanding schedules of credit professionals, offering:
· A hybrid training approach that combines on-demand video tutorials, live teach-ins, webinars, and interactive Q&A sessions with Sabrina Fox.
· Bite-sized learning that explains essential contract details without overwhelming students, focusing on what matters most.
· A glossary of legalese and contextual explanations to make contracts accessible to non-lawyers.
· Client Success Program that awards Certification upon passing a final exam (85%+) and offers feedback for students who do not pass and wish to retake. The Certification represents a robust understanding of legal risk and is a license to operate in levfin.
Fox said, “Fox Legal Training’s mission is to help credit professionals find the legal and mines buried in complex documents, so they are ready to act quickly when a credit approaches a red flag moment due to poor financial results, a material asset sale, or news that a borrower is appointing advisors or considering an LME. The risks of borrowers priming existing lenders, delaying repayments or diverting value are real and playing out in the market today. Lenders relying solely on credit analysis when these contracts are full of loopholes that have eroded protections are only assessing half of the picture. The age of outsourcing legal risks to lawyers is over – credit professionals are best served when they are empowered to assess legal risks themselves so they can engage more effectively with in-house and external counsel and be prepared to act decisively to properly protect their portfolios.”
Media inquiries
Kelsey Traynor, Caburn Communications
+44(0) 7495470187
Mark Lunn, Caburn Communications
+44(0) 7775992309
Notes to Editors
About Fox Legal Training
Fox Legal Training provides tailor made, online, on-demand and in-person legal training to meet the specific needs of busy credit professionals. We support clients in overcoming the technical, practical, and philosophical barriers to understanding contracts and navigating legal risks in the fast-evolving levfin market.
Online Training I Teach- ins I Webinars I Primary Market Education Series I Framework for Legal Risk I Student Success Programme & Certification
About Sabrina Fox
Sabrina Fox is a passionate advocate of individual empowerment through education.
Sabrina founded the European Leveraged Finance Association (ELFA) in 2019 in part to provide lenders with a platform to resist further dilution of lender protections as a collective, only to find that the market’s wariness of collusion rules stymied this possibility. ELFA has since grown to greatly increase transparency, improve disclosure, and enhance engagement for leveraged finance market participants, and Sabrina shifted her focus to Fox Legal Training, which provides legal education as a means to address the growing risk of looser contracts.
She started her career as a finance lawyer working on high yield bond deals in 2003, moving from her home of Los Angeles to London in 2004. At Paul Weiss, she worked for private equity sponsors and corporates, structuring high yield covenant packages and drafting offering memoranda disclosure.
In 2010, Sabrina joined Debt Explained to build their Market Maker software which allows users to compare terms across deals in an instant. Sabrina noticed a trend in documentation toward more flexibility for the borrower and private equity owners, and this only continued from 2015 when she joined Covenant Review to open the London office with a series of in-person teach-ins designed to raise awareness of the importance of covenant terms.
She calls 2015-2018 “The Covenant Wars” era in Europe, when deal after deal was brought to market with some new provision that further eroded lender protections that had been relied upon as standard for decades. Lenders would win a battle or two only to eventually lose the war on a term or concept. With many lenders negotiating against a single borrower, and a heated race for yield underway, covenant erosion continued almost unabated throughout that time.
With her unique perspective on the weakening of lender protections, Sabrina founded Fox Legal Training to equip market participants with the tools and knowledge to resist covenant erosion and negotiate stronger protections.
Sabrina firmly believes that knowledge is power – and in this case, the best insurance against the worst excesses of lender protection dilution over the past decade. The days of leaving the contracts to the lawyers are over – in her view, any analysis of credit that leaves out the docs will only provide half of the picture.
Fox Legal Training’s mission is to bring the entire market up to a minimum viable knowledge of legal terms in order to streamline processes, avoid losses, make returns, and strengthen engagement between market participants.