Lance Peterson practices in the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster as a member of the firm’s Financial Transactions Group. Mr. Peterson provides commercial lending advice to banks and other institutional lenders, funds, and other credit providers, credit enhancers, sponsors, and borrowers in connection with both secured and unsecured financing transactions involving credit takers operating in a variety of industries, including the technology, life sciences, renewable energy, health services, food services, automotive, human resource, wine, retail, communications, sports franchise, and broadcasting industries. Mr. Peterson has advised clients in connection with bilateral and syndicated facilities, asset-based facilities and cash‑flow-based facilities, domestic and cross-border loans, letter of credit financings, standby credit enhancement facilities, private placements of debt securities, and bankruptcy-related financings. Mr. Peterson has experience representing both borrowers and lenders in connection with various credit tranches, including senior, mezzanine, and subordinated tranches, and in connection with workouts and restructurings.
Mr. Peterson has particular experience representing agent banks in connection with the origination, structuring, negotiation, and administration of syndicated financings, including financings involving investment-grade and highly leveraged borrowers, various credit enhancement devices, complex intercreditor issues, and foreign and non-normative collateral features. In addition, Mr. Peterson has represented finance subsidiaries in connection with collateral-secured vendor finance programs and has advised other clients with respect to outsource service and technology licensing matters, transactional-insolvency-related matters (such as fraudulent conveyance and preferential transfer risk analysis, debtor-in-possession financings, and creditor’s rights questions), and general corporate and contract documentation matters.
Mr. Peterson received his J.D. in 1999 from the University of California Hastings College of the Law, where he not only served as an articles editor for the Constitutional Law Quarterly but also received an American Jurisprudence Award for Constitutional Law. Mr. Peterson was a judicial intern for the Honorable Judge Richard Kramer (Civil Division of the California State Superior Court) and for the Honorable Judge Kevin McCarthy (Criminal Division of the California State Superior Court).
Prior to joining Morrison & Foerster, Mr. Peterson was associated with White & Case LLP and, prior to that, with Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP.