Pillsbury provides comprehensive legal services to participants in the investment funds and investment management industry. Our breadth of experience and depth of resources across practice areas allow us to guide clients through a challenging market and rapidly changing regulatory environment. Through our London, Tokyo and Shanghai offices and relationships around the world, we are able to serve as a single point of contact for clients seeking advice regarding transactions that touch multiple jurisdictions. The Legal 500 recognized Pillsbury’s Investment Funds and Investment Management practice in 2010 as having “the right experience and great depth of industry knowledge.”

We represent a broad range of clients, including investments funds, investment advisers, broker-dealers and institutional investors.

Investment Funds

The successful creation and operation of an investment fund requires careful consideration of a multitude of intricate and interrelated legal issues, such as tax-efficient structuring, registration requirements, marketing restrictions, employee benefits, intellectual property and ongoing regulatory compliance obligations. We work closely with clients to design fund structures and compliance regimes that address these issues in an economical, efficient and, most importantly, reliable manner. We represent funds in all stages of conflicts with regulators, investors and business partners, including in arbitration proceedings, litigation and out-of-court negotiations and settlements.

Our investment fund clients include U.S. and non-U.S. hedge funds, private equity funds, commodity pools, venture capital funds, mutual funds and REITs and encompass the entire spectrum of assets classes, including equities, fixed income, futures, commodities, real estate, currencies, derivatives and art.

Investment Advisers

Investment advisers recently find themselves shouldering an increasingly heavy regulatory burden and, with regulators and investors both intensifying their scrutiny of investment professionals, the dangers of noncompliance have become far greater. We have extensive experience forming investment advisers, structuring relationships between advisers’ principals, registering advisers with the SEC, CFTC and state regulators, designing, implementing and assessing compliance policies and procedures and drafting disclosure and marketing materials.

Broker-Dealers

Our practice represents broker-dealers and their employees in SEC and self-regulatory organization (SRO) investigations and compliance reviews and advises on policies and procedures and supervisory controls. Our broker-dealer practice is a natural outgrowth of our representation of traditional banking clients, many of which are foreign banks with substantial securities operations in their home countries.

Our clients include broker-dealer affiliates of banks, thrifts and trust companies chartered in the U.S. and abroad, unaffiliated broker-dealers and non-profit organizations partnering with broker-dealers to offer financial services and products to their members. The diversity of our clients and their markets enables us to provide useful strategic perspectives, as well as industry-specific legal experience.

Institutional Investors

Recent financial scandals have underscored the need for investors to conduct thorough due diligence prior to investing in funds. Pillsbury assists funds of funds and other institutional investors through all stages of the investment process. We are available to conduct due diligence on target funds, including reviewing organizational and offering materials, performing background checks on fund principals, analyzing compliance policies and procedures and assessing the quality of service providers. We also represent investors in the negotiation of subscription agreements, side letters and other contracts with the goal of obtaining preferential disclosure, consent and other rights.

After an investment is made, Pillsbury is available to conduct periodic due diligence to ensure the fund and its adviser continue to comply with investment policies and side letters and to report on any disciplinary matters, litigation or other developments that could adversely affect the client’s investment.