Michael Fransella is Of Counsel to the firm in the Washington, D.C., office of Morrison & Foerster LLP, where he is a member of the Financial Transactions Group, specializing in secondary debt transactions. He represents banks, broker-dealers, asset managers, and other entities on a variety of par and distressed loan and claim trading transactions using LSTA, LMA, ISDA, and sui generis documentation. He has closed over 1,000 distressed debt trades, and supervises the par loan trading practice.
Mr. Fransella advises clients on compliance, tax, securities, UCC, regulatory, ERISA, contract interpretation, nonpublic information/informational walls, and other issues incident to the clients' transactions and businesses. In addition to loans, Mr. Fransella has worked extensively on transfers of bankruptcy claims, trades of private-placement securities, and transactions involving Latin American and other international debt assets and related restructurings, and has represented clients on strategic debt and equity investments, structuring and creation of special-purpose subsidiaries, and structuring of derivative instruments. He is a frequent participant in LSTA initiatives to draft and promulgate standard documents, and has been responsible for a number of forms, contractual mechanisms, and drafting solutions that have subsequently become widely used in the market.
Mr. Fransella received his J.D. in 2001 from Yale Law School, where he was Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal and Notes Editor of the Yale Journal on Regulation.