Laura Collins
Laura is an Associate in the Finance Team and part of the specialist Embedded Finance Team at CMS.
Laura acts for a range of clients including corporates, banks, funds and private equity sponsors in relation to cross border and domestic syndicated and bilateral funding transactions. She advises on a range of financing transactions such as acquisition lending, corporate lending, leverage finance and real estate finance.
Laura specialises in tech financing transactions, with a particular focus on fintech, embedded finance and platform lending. She has worked on transactions with the Embedded Finance Team at CMS, including advising on debt-raises and the establishment of embedded finance products (including B2B BNPL, B2C BNPL, lending and payments, revenue-based financing, income share arrangements and embedded insurance). Laura is also a member of the firm’s equIP programme and Fintech Associates group.
Prior to working at CMS Laura trained and worked within the Banking and Finance Team at another large international law firm. She undertook two secondments at financial institutions, one involving co-ordinating and leading the LIBOR reform project for the UK Legal teams, including feeding into the LMA and Bank of England’s RFR working groups.
Practice Area
Panel
- Contributing Author
Qualified Year
- 2017
Experience
- Norton Rose Fulbright LLP (2017 - 2022)
Qualifications
- LLB (2016)
- LPC (2017)
Education
- University of York (2013 - 2016)
- BPP Law School (2016 - 2017)
1 Contributions by Laura Collins
PRACTICE NOTES
Security over intellectual property under English law: lender-focused practical guide to due diligence, creation, registration and enforcement across patents, trade marks, copyright and designs
Introduction
It is ever more accepted that every enterprise holds and deploys some form of IP. Financiers active in markets with IP-heavy companies are paying closer attention to making sure their collateral captures the worth embodied in that IP. The legal position on taking security over IP remains unsettled, requiring lenders to navigate ambiguity. Moreover, charging IP rights can be expensive to establish and challenging to realise. A funder must begin by pinpointing and assessing the borrower’s IP. It should differentiate categories of IP, for instance rights with proprietary attributes and those arising under contracts. It should also appreciate that a firm’s IP is typically interconnected, such as a patent and the related know-how that gives the patent practical value. Finance lawyers must likewise consider the intrinsic nature of the IP and the setting from which its value derives. A central issue is how the lender could monetise the IP if the security is enforced. This assessment underpins any practical and effective approach to enforcing the security. Resolving that in each situation demands insight into how the borrower conducts its business and the role IP plays within it...
IP
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