AICA Service Provider Profile: Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP has been advising the closed-end fund, BDC and interval fund industry for more than three decades. The Firm’s roots go back a lot further than that. Founded in 1884 and headquartered in New York, Simpson Thacher is a law firm whose clients include many of the world’s leading asset managers, investment funds, financial institutions and public companies.

As legal counsel rather than an asset manager, the Firm doesn’t run funds or manage capital directly. Its job is advising the sponsors who do, on everything from product structuring to regulatory strategy.

Simpson Thacher has more than 160 lawyers dedicated to registered funds.

That advisory role has put Simpson Thacher at the center of some of the registered fund industry’s most significant launches. The Firm has worked on many of the market’s most innovative closed-end funds, BDCs, interval funds and other products that provide retail access to private markets, and points to repeat-client relationships as the clearest evidence of that track record.

Simpson Thacher’s client base spans the full range of registered fund sponsors. The Firm describes its strongest work as helping market leaders shape the next generation of investment products: expanding retail access to private markets through registered fund structures, and developing first-of-their-kind structures as the industry evolves. Right now, that means a heavy focus on the retailization of private credit, private equity and other alternative strategies offered through registered wrappers, a trend the Firm expects to keep driving product innovation across the sector.

Simpson Thacher joined AICA because the organization gives industry participants a forum to exchange ideas, discuss regulatory developments and build a broader understanding of closed-end funds, BDCs and interval funds, a mission the Firm says aligns with its own commitment to education and engagement across the investment community. Looking ahead, the Firm expects to keep advising clients through the convergence of traditional and alternative asset management, helping sponsors develop new products and navigate an increasingly dynamic regulatory and market environment.

I didn’t start out thinking I wanted to be a registered funds lawyer. In fact, I was mostly interested in doing M&A. However, when I was a summer associate, the M&A deal I worked on involved the acquisition of an investment adviser, and I was more interested in the investment adviser regulatory aspects of the transaction. So, I acted on that, indicated I’d be interested in working in the registered funds group when I returned and focused more on this area when I went back for my last year of law school. When I returned as a first year associate, I started doing registered funds work and liked it. During that time, I continued to build on my knowledge and skillset. Fun fact: I was a first-year associate in 2007, and the first fund I was counsel to was an interval fund. It has been quite the round trip I’ve taken, with interval funds again being an important part of the CEF growth story.

My hobbies include strength training, collecting vintage baseball cards and collecting coins. The coin collection is actually quite interesting and has been in my family for almost 200 years. It was started by my great-great-great-grandfather in the mid-19th century, and has been passed on from generation to generation. I work on it from time to time with my 12-year-old son.

For me, as a lawyer, AICA has been a great venue to read, hear and understand the investment professional’s perspective on the products that I help to create, care for and feed. It also offers beneficial insight into what it is about those products that they value. And it is the diversity of that perspective that I appreciate the most. Having that perspective has helped me to be a better counselor to my clients because understanding the legal framework is only one piece of the puzzle.