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What areas of the law interest you?
Throughout its long and enterprising history, Shearman & Sterling has been at the forefront of the legal profession. Founded in 1873, the firm’s early clients epitomized the important changes occurring in financial and industrial sectors during the nineteenth century, such as the expansion of banking and investment institutions, railroad reorganizations, and the growth of the oil industry. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the firm’s practice encompassed international representation of both American and multinational organizations doing business in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Now, in the twenty-first century, with an impressive array of talent, diversity, and professional knowledge we are capable of solving the challenges of our clients anywhere in the world.
Shearman & Sterling hires legal assistants to work in all of its practice groups: Antitrust, Asset Management, Bankruptcy & Reorganization, Capital Markets, Executive Compensation & Employee Benefits, Finance, Litigation, Mergers & Acquisitions, Private Client, Property, and Tax. Generally, legal assistants work directly with partners and associates on matters related to their assigned groups; however, they may also be assigned to cases and/or deals in other practice groups. The firm’s ultimate goal is to allow legal assistants to develop the broad range of experience and skills necessary to grow professionally.
Practice Area Overview
Antitrust
The Antitrust Group is focused on finding practical solutions to the myriad competition issues that clients—both domestic and international—face in the contemporary business world. Attorneys in the group take a multidisciplinary approach, combining legal and economic knowledge to deliver quality cross-border services quickly and efficiently. The Antitrust team represents clients in a wide array of complex antitrust cases, including private treble damage actions, federal grand jury investigations into price fixing, market allocation, and bid rigging, as well as cartel and abuse of dominance proceedings before the European Commission, and private actions involving competition issues before US courts. Antitrust lawyers regularly appear before the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the European Union’s Competition Commission.
Legal assistants in the Antitrust Group organize document productions, help prepare pre-merger notification filings, perform legal and market research, and organize and maintain transaction files.
Asset Management
The Asset Management Group is counsel to some of the largest fund complexes and investment advisory organizations in the world. Asset Management lawyers have in-depth knowledge in creating intricate, structured derivatives transactions and advise on the development, structuring, and execution of several types of derivatives projects and hybrid instruments across asset classes, such as equity, fixed income, currency, and credit and commodity-linked instruments. The group’s lawyers often represent domestic and international banks before federal and state regulatory agencies, including the Federal Reserve Bank.
The responsibilities of legal assistants in the Asset Management Group include factual and legal research, preparation of regulatory filings, and aiding with the formation of entities.
Bankruptcy & Reorganization
Drawing on Shearman & Sterling’s corporate background, the Bankruptcy & Reorganization Group covers all facets of bankruptcy work, including representation of distressed companies and Chapter 11 debtors, creditor committees, banks and other creditors, and buyers and sellers of distressed assets. The group’s lawyers play a leading role in global restructurings and insolvencies.
Legal assistants support the Bankruptcy & Reorganization team in all aspects: organizing and maintaining case files, corporate research, drafting, proofreading and revising documents, monitoring court docket reports, preparing and maintaining working group lists, preparing fee applications, and cite-checking of briefs and memoranda.
Capital Markets
Building on its long history in the financial sphere, the firm’s Capital Markets Group is a leader in the development and globalization of capital markets, combining innovative capital-raising strategies with broad transactional experience. Lawyers in the group advise clients on all types of securities deals, regulatory compliance matters, and corporate governance issues, such as initial public offerings, investment grade and high-yield debt offerings, liability management transactions, convertible debt, trust preferred securities, and compliance counseling to non-US multinationals that are subject to US regulatory standards.
Working closely with the Capital Markets team, legal assistants perform research, assist on due diligence investigations and transaction closings, help prepare filings for government regulatory agencies, compose corporate governance documentation, and draft corporate documents.
Executive Compensation & Employee Benefits
In today’s competitive marketplace, employee benefits plans and executive compensation agreements have become indispensable tools for attracting and retaining first-rate talent. The Executive Compensation & Employee Benefits Group advises business enterprises, boards, and individuals on every aspect of compensation and executive employment, including retirement and severance arrangements, SEC disclosure and liability regulations, and financial reporting. The group’s lawyers are involved in the cross-disciplinary tax, ERISA, pension investment, securities, asset management, and corporate governance issues that increasingly play a critical role in the legal and regulatory environment of executive compensation. Operating in this quick-paced setting, legal assistants support the Executive Compensation & Employee Benefits attorneys by helping prepare correspondence, memoranda, pension and welfare benefits and executive compensation plans, employment agreements, and applications for governmental review. Additionally, they analyze personnel policies and practices, help prepare SEC filings, create corporate profiles, and assist with due diligence.
Finance
The Finance Group has one of the most extensive global financial practices of any international law firm. Encompassing three focus areas—Bank Finance, Project Development & Finance, and Structured Finance—the group’s lawyers are involved in all aspects of financial services, from asset-based financings to structured derivatives transactions. The following brief descriptions outline the breadth of the group’s capabilities:
Bank Finance
Representing a range of financial institutions and service providers, Bank Finance lawyers work on tender offers, merger and leveraged recapitalization financings, first and second lien loan structures, senior and subordinated bridge transactions, secured lending, investment grade loans, and structuring and documenting (both domestically and internationally) commercial paper backstop facilities, among other transactions.
Project Development & Finance
The Project Development & Finance attorneys advise on infrastructure projects around the world, from gold mines in Chile to LNG facilities in Nigeria. The team is involved in initial development, restructuring, and refinancing of projects, project mergers, acquisitions, dispositions, political risk insurance and split-risk arrangements, and international dispute resolution as it relates to projects. They also represent all manner of clients, including sponsors, investment banks, placement agents, underwriters, and contractors, as well as others.
Structured Finance
Lawyers in Structured Finance are engaged in an array of financings, such as asset-backed securities and commercial paper, structured swaps and derivatives, enhanced equipment trust certificates, and research and development joint ventures.
Legal assistants in the Finance Group participate in a wide variety of matters, such as performing corporate research, drafting ancillary agreements, documents, and correspondence, initiating lien searches, preparing UCC filings to perfect security interests, and organizing and assisting in closings, among other responsibilities.
Litigation
Involved in some of the most prominent commercial, criminal, and enforcement actions, the Litigation Group represents clients in trial and appellate work in all courts throughout the United States and Europe, and before international arbitration panels and tribunals, including the International Chamber of Commerce and the London Court of International Arbitration. Areas of the practice cover securities class actions and related SEC investigations, civil antitrust matters, breach of contract, contested takeovers, fraud claims, and intellectual property disputes, as well as white-collar criminal actions.
Litigation legal assistants accompany the group's lawyers to court, aid in trial preparation, review client files, organize and develop background materials for depositions, draft case histories, prepare filings for court, and conduct research.
Mergers & Acquisitions
Ranked among the world’s pre-eminent mergers and acquisitions advisors, Shearman & Sterling’s M&A Group handles a wide spectrum of transactions, such as acquisitions of privately owned companies, divisions and subsidiaries, negotiated and contested public acquisitions, joint ventures and strategic alliances, and substantial equity investments. Lawyers in the group also represent companies in shareholder meetings and proxy contests. Some complementary areas of experience that are often covered in M&A transactions include antitrust, bankruptcy and reorganization, executive compensation and employee benefits, finance, intellectual property, litigation and arbitration, and tax.
In the collaborative environment of the M&A Group, legal assistants participate in all stages of the group’s transactions, from initial engagement to deal closings. Legal assistants create corporate profiles, help with due diligence, incorporation and dissolution of companies, maintain stock transfer ledgers and case files, and draft corporate documents and SEC filings.
Private Client
The Private Client Group has an active trust and estates practice, representing high-net-worth individuals and families, privately owned companies, and important private foundations and charitable organizations, both in the United States and abroad. The group’s lawyers advise on succession arrangements, complex estate and trust administration, family-limited partnerships, tax-favored structures for overseas investments, contested estate and trust proceedings, and bequests of fine art collections, among other related matters.
Private Client legal assistants work on a variety of matters, such as drafting probate documents, helping with valuations of estate assets, collecting, maintaining, distributing and preserving estate assets, preparing and filing federal and state estate taxes and federal gift returns, attending tax audits, and preparing estate files and trustees' accountings.
Property
Immersed in transactions concerning some of the world’s most iconic structures, the Property Group has a reputation for sophistication and excellence in the areas of acquisitions and dispositions, development, environmental regulation, financing funds, joint ventures, and leasing. Working globally, lawyers in the group counsel diverse parties, including pension plans, tax-exempts, and foreign investors, on retail, industrial, office, hotel, resort, residential, timber and agricultural, recreational, and mixed-use properties.
Legal assistants review title reports, uniform commercial code searches and land surveys, draft officer’s certificates and other transaction documents, conduct legal research, prepare due diligence summaries, form and maintain corporations and limited liability companies, assist with closings, and maintain transaction and document files.
Tax
In its representation of multinational companies in cross-border transactions and financial offerings, the Tax Group provides state-of-the-art advice on tax law and its global development. Given that there are tax consequences in almost all commercial activity, the group's lawyers undertake an enormous variety of cases, such as mergers and acquisitions, post-acquisition restructurings and reorganizations, spin-offs, split-offs, and spin-merger deals, bankruptcy work-outs, debt-equity swaps, recapitalizations and distressed loan transactions, structured finance and tax-advantaged investments, and public and private real estate contracts. Additionally, the Tax Group litigation team advises clients on disputes with the Internal Revenue Service, both before the agency and in court. The group’s lawyers have tried cases in the United States Tax Court and the Court of Federal Claims, as well as the federal district and appellate courts.
Tax Group legal assistants are involved in all phases of the group’s work, including compiling relevant legal authorities, monitoring and distributing new tax regulations and legislation, preparing spreadsheets, maintaining client and team resource files, and researching tax issues.
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