Leah Edelboim Joins Cadwalader’s Finance Group

February 24, 2021

Leading fund finance lawyer will advise banks and other financial institutions.

Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP announced today that Leah Edelboim has joined the firm’s market-leading fund finance group as a special counsel in New York. She worked previously at Clifford Chance.

Edelboim advises banks and other financial institutions on syndicated and bilateral subscription credit facilities as well as NAV, asset-backed and hybrid facilities. She also has significant experience representing private equity, real estate, natural resources, debt funds and other fund borrowers in these transactions. Edelboim also represents funds in a variety of direct lending transactions.

Edelboim's finance experience also includes advising lenders and corporate, sponsor, and investor borrowers in all aspects of secured and unsecured financing transactions, with a wide range of lending structures including acquisition and leveraged loans, investment grade facilities, middle market loans, asset-based loans, project finance transactions, and private placements. Both her lender and borrower representations have often involved a cross-border aspect.

“Leah is a sensational addition to our fund finance practice,” said Cadwalader finance group chair Mike Mascia. “She is one of the rising stars of our industry. She has nearly a decade of fund finance experience including on some really challenging matters for tier 1 sponsors. We are eager to make her available to assist our clients.”

Cadwalader’s market-leading transatlantic fund finance team regularly represents the agent, lead arrangers and lenders on subscription credit, capital call and other fund finance facilities for private equity, real estate and other investment funds of all sizes and vintages sponsored by many of the world’s preeminent fund sponsors. In 2020 alone, Cadwalader advised clients on 574 separate fund finance facilities with aggregate lender commitments of $115 billion.

“Cadwalader is such a dominant force in the fund finance space, both here in the U.S. and in London,” Edelboim said. “I see this as a great opportunity to work with some of the best fund finance lawyers in the world. I also know many of Cadwalader’s clients from being across from them over the years. I am very excited that I will be now be working on their side of the table.”

Edelboim’s arrival follows the recent addition of partner M. Chadwick “Chad” Stackhouse to the fund finance practice in Cadwalader’s Washington, D.C. office. Stackhouse advises banks and credit providers on secured lending transactions, with an emphasis on fund finance and technology and venture debt lending. He has nearly two decades of experience representing major U.S. financial institutions and foreign debt providers in commercial lending transactions. These transactions involve public and private technology companies, venture capital and private equity funds, life science companies, and high net worth individuals. He joined the firm from Troutman Pepper, where he led the firm’s Fund Finance practice and was a member of the Technology and Venture Lending practice section.

Elsewhere across the firm, a market-leading litigation team from Boies Schiller – led by renowned litigator Nicholas Gravante and including partners Philip Iovieno, Karen Dyer and Lawrence Brandman – joined Cadwalader in January.  Gravante, Iovieno, Dyer and Brandman are important additions to a growing Global Litigation Group, which has grown with the recent additions in the past year of former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau senior counsel Rachel Rodman in Washington’s white collar practice; London white collar partners Mark Beardsworth and Kevin Roberts; State Attorneys General Practice head Doug Gansler, the former Maryland Attorney General; and a Boies Schiller civil litigation team comprised of Sean O’Shea, Michael Petrella and Amanda Devereux. Also joining the firm in 2020 were London funds formation partner Michael Newell and London capital markets partner Matthew Duncan.