JV/Loan Docs
When did you get comfortable with reviewing docs, how many years/how many deals did it take to confidentially review and markup a JV doc? My current firm and mentor does a good job of giving me exposure to it now given my young age, but like all young people I want to be better faster so just curious at what point you were able to take ownership with confidence.
Getting comfortable leading doc negotiation is most about asking a lot of questions and repetition.
For me, it took about 6 months of reading tons of docs/listening in on discussions before I understood the places borrowers usually tried to negotiate (I'm in debt) and what the company position was. From there, it was probably another 6 months to a year where I worked under someone before I started negotiating on my own. Debt is a probably a bit quicker though because I was working on 20+ transactions a year where as equity guys might only do 3.
I also worked in debt but dude only 20 transactions a year? I worked in debt underwriting and was working on 20 transactions at ONE time.
Underwriting a bunch of deals and closing a bunch of deals are two different things. You might be evaluating 20 deals at once as an underwriter, but you don't actually get all 20 to term sheets and closing at one time.
You certainly wouldn't be closing 20 deals at one time; nobody would be able to keep track of negotiating (20) 200 page loan agreements at once. You would need a huge staff to do that and there are very few shops that do that kind of volume (I can only think of small balance focused banks that do that kind of volume and they also have hundreds of underwriting/relationship managers across the country).
Fair, amount of deals closed is lower. We also never had to negotiate the actual loan documents, they were mostly standard and it was a more take it or leave it situation. Our funders/lawyers did that part of the negotiation/amendments, if needed. My team only worked on the LOIs and the Commitment letters (~12 pages or so)
One trick I've learned over the years is to always remember your deals. And pull up old deals. See an ask on a clause? Pull up 10 recent deals to see what the group did. It has worked for me every time. And I am definitely sick of asking our younger guys "what did we do last time".
The worst young people I work with who handle JV docs are those who say "yea thats fine" and at the 11th hour I read it and have to ask wtf is this.
Examples:
dropping a guarantor
changing thresholds for control rights to levels we've never agreed to
anything we've never agreed to
That being said, it's a fine line. If you need too much assistance, that's bad. If you make bad judgement calls, also bad.
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