Last week I had the pleasure of witnessing the progress of one of my students in real time. Having joined the course only a few weeks ago, he sent over a completed covenant capacity grid for my review ahead of a catch-up call.
What I saw absolutely thrilled me – the grid was almost flawless, highlighting nearly every significant basket across debt and liens, restricted payments and permitted investments. His work showed the tangible benefits of dedicated study and proved the thesis that underpinned my establishment of FLT:
Covenant analysis can be learned by leveraged finance market professionals (including non-lawyers).
FLT’s Leveraged Finance Covenant Training course is designed to create a framework in our students’ minds for how to analyse covenants, guiding them module-by-module through the concepts and practical steps to analyse covenants for any credit in a leveraged finance deal, whether in a high yield bond, leveraged loan or private debt agreement.
In our Advanced Covenant Analysis course, we teach students how to look at covenants in specific contexts in our Covenant Analysis in Stressed and Distressed Scenarios module, dive deeper into covenant calculations in our Calculating Covenant Capacity module, and investigate the purpose behind these provisions in our Mastering Covenant Principles module.
During our upcoming in-person event, taking place on 19 March at The Ned, we will take students to the next stage in their covenant education journeys with Practical Covenant Analysis, a module that will ground their covenant knowledge with real-world application.
It’s one thing to learn the concepts, but knowing how to apply them in your day-to-day role allows the theory to be put into practice. During the session, we will use a case study to analyse debt and liens, restricted payments and asset sales, and change of control provisions, using our Calculating Covenant Capacity Excel to track sources of capacity.
At the end of the session, we will have taken the guesswork out of covenant analysis and students will walk away with the confidence to complete a covenant grid in 90 minutes.
We will also be joined by special guests Andrew Martin and Matthew Hughes, partners at Crowell & Moring LLP, who will discuss distressed debt and claims trading, including issues unique to modern vintage syndicated credit agreements.
Their presentation is the second instalment of our new Content Partnership Series, designed to keep students on the cutting edge of market developments with leading practitioners.
In our first instalment, which has now been made available to FLT students, Crowell & Moring partners Andrew Knight and Jennifer Kafcas discuss intercreditor arrangements in the context of unitrache structures, and the evolution of the LMA construct in a new era of flexible covenants. They also discuss how hedging fits into the overall picture.
If you are interested in joining us for the next in-person event, or would like to schedule a demo of our first-of-its-kind online covenant education platform, send an email sabrina@foxlegaltraining.com.