Overview
Our investment management clients are creative and innovative. We attack the myriad complex issues confronting these clients in an efficient, interdisciplinary and solution-oriented manner that allows us to provide comprehensive answers that are pragmatic and make sense for their businesses.
Multiple perspectives, attentive market insight
We have decades-long relationships with many of the world's largest and most successful financial market participants, including investment managers and institutional investors. Our sell-side and buy-side knowledge allows our business-minded attorneys to use their market insight to provide customized, tax-efficient advice that is also commercial in nature. We offer our clients legal counsel both in the United States and globally. Our UK practice works seamlessly with our US team to help open global market opportunities for our clients.
Our work often begins with helping our investment management clients structure their management companies, and we help them navigate the myriad of operational and legal decisions they must make as they build their businesses, ranging from tax and corporate to intellectual property and trusts and estates.
Then, in a partnership approach, we handle virtually anything our clients require in connection with the establishment and ongoing operation of their businesses, including advising on all matters of regulatory compliance. With unparalleled experience representing quantitative managers using algorithmic strategies, our attorneys are uniquely positioned to help clients navigate the complexities of this highly technical arena.
Quantitative and algorithmic trading know-how
Our team has been at the forefront of this trading strategy since its inception. With our roots in Chicago, we have served as counsel to some of the world's largest quant funds and most of the industry’s major proprietary trading firms, including the early pioneers of these strategies. We understand the full panoply of factors that impact algorithmic and high-speed trading success, including the flood of new and proposed regulations globally, the competition for technology and talent, the importance of intellectual property protection and data security, and the effects of trading errors and system malfunctions. We guide clients that use quantitative and algorithmic methods through the full scope of issues vital to their business, including corporate and transactional, regulatory and compliance, litigation and enforcement, tax, technology and cybersecurity, and employment, among others. Our integrated, 360-degree approach allows us to recognize potential issues before they become problems and to develop commercially practical solutions.
Proactive regulatory monitoring, business-focused litigation
The volume of regulations and intensity of regulatory scrutiny has increased exponentially within the private funds space in the past decade, and that escalation continues. Katten provides proactive advice to our clients to help them avoid regulatory pitfalls. If investors are talking about or concerned about a matter, we seek to prepare our clients — to stay ahead of the curve — before they get a call from their investors or from regulators.
If litigation becomes necessary, we have aggressively and successfully litigated scores of complex high-stakes matters for our private fund clients. Our litigators understand the full range of financial services and products and are deeply familiar with the compliance and supervisory regimes, capital structures, and real-world business interests of the industry — and we counsel our clients with their long-term business interests firmly in mind.
Collective investment arrangements
Our team works with clients across the UK, Europe and around the globe on a multiplicity of complex and varied mandates related to collective investment arrangements in both trading and investing contexts. We are particularly skilled in crafting bespoke investment structures using vehicles in a variety of jurisdictions and navigating various tax and regulatory regimes to satisfy the specific requirements of investment managers and investors alike, whether in funds, joint ventures or other arrangements. With these skills, we routinely advise market participants in a commercial and efficient manner in all phases of the life cycle of investments in collective investment structures — whether at the outset, on the acquisition and disposal of investment portfolios on the secondary market, and on coinvestment arrangements with collective investment structures.
"I would best describe their viewpoint and commitment to us as advocate and partner. They have an apex knowledge of private funds and hedge fund law combined with deep experience working across the full regulatory and commercial ecosystem with which they intersect. Together, these form pillars of trust and faith in their representing us."
U.S. News – Best Lawyers® 2023 "Best Law Firms"
(Private Funds/Hedge Funds Law) survey response
Insights
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Publication | March 25, 2025
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News | March 25, 2025
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News | March 21, 2025
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Publication | March 2025
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Publication | March 6, 2025
Key Contacts
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Partner and Co-Chair, Investment Management and Trading+1.312.902.5322 -
Partner and Co-Chair, Investment Management and Trading+1.312.902.5336
Chicago
