Claire L. Hall 

Claire L. Hall is co-head of DLA Piper LLP’s derivatives group, where she represents issuers, underwriters and investors in a broad range of domestic and cross-border structured, warehouse and asset-backed finance transactions.

Born, raised and schooled in the U.K., Hall was doing finance work in London when her attorney husband was offered a New York posting. “I’d always wanted to live and work in New York, and finance was a way to work across borders and jurisdictions,” Hall said.

She spent a year at the firm now known as Milbank LLP and another year at Deutsche Bank’s New York offices before the financial crisis hit. She and her husband rode it out back in London. Then he was offered a job in Los Angeles.

“I figured L.A. would be a fun place to live, but I can’t say I loved it at first,” Hall said. “London and New York are so easy to navigate by tube and subway. But after a bit of adjustment, I created a finance practice that works.”

Work hours are an issue because much of the financial world is centered on Eastern and British time zones. “To do it from here requires getting up really early.”

Hall represented Concord, an international music publisher and theatrical rights licensing company whose catalog includes talent ranging from Pink Floyd to Rogers & Hammerstein, in a massive asset-backed securitization offering of music rights worth $1.8 billion.

The deal, structured by Apollo Global Management, closed in December 2022. It was the largest securitization in the music industry to date in terms of both size of issuance and number of assets, which total more than one million copyrights.

“This was similar to what we do for a lot of clients — borrow against future revenue streams,” Hall said. “You can do it from all sorts of regular cash flow situations, and this was a very large version of that.”

Hall added that there’s been a recent uptick in the music industry structured financial arrangements like this one. “David Bowie sold bonds 15 years ago,” she said. “It was the first time an artist got financing from a future catalog. That was groundbreaking, but then the market went quiet for a while.”

“Then bankers pitched ideas to clients who were interested in lending to industries in this way. Concord liked the concept and brought us on to structure the deal legally. One challenge was that there were a lot of elements outside the U.S. in France and Germany, for instance. That made it very interesting when we had to consider the nuances of local laws.”

The transaction closed just before Christmas. “Everybody got some well-deserved rest — and then the Champagne flowed,” Hall said.

–John Roemer