We offer genuinely integrated, end-to-end support across trading, regulation, transactions, and enforcement in the ENR sector. Our lawyers understand how fast-moving energy and commodity markets intersect with complex, overlapping rulebooks, and we help clients turn that complexity into a commercial advantage.
Our global team guides traders, financial institutions, fund managers, utilities, energy majors, exchanges, clearing houses, benchmark administrators, data vendors, market service providers, and emerging market participants through market access restrictions, product development, derivatives regulation, reporting and disclosure requirements, market-conduct requirements, physical commodity oversight, and cross-border compliance. With an integrated team across the United States, the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, we deliver coordinated, practical advice that keeps trades moving, mitigates regulatory and enforcement risk, and supports growth and innovation across jurisdictions.
Whatever your objective – establishing or reorganizing a business, developing a product, launching a platform, providing or using FinTech solutions, scaling a trading strategy, resolving an inquiry, or closing a deal – we bring clear advice and decisive execution.
Our experience
- All aspects of financial and energy regulation relevant to market participants, on a global and local basis, including on market access and licensing issues, prudential regulation, derivatives and market infrastructure regulation, position limits, reporting and recordkeeping requirements, futures and options markets regulation, insider dealing and market manipulation regulation, energy trading regimes, renewables and emissions, benchmark regulation, sanctions, crypto-asset regulation, anti-money laundering, financial crime, and all types of associated reporting regimes.
- Areas of legislation covered include: MiFID2, EMIR, REMIT, MAR, BMR, IFR/IFD, EU ETS and UK ETS, RED, AIFMD, MLD, ABC, and MICA in the UK and Europe, and specific gas and power; CEA, Dodd-Frank, FPA, NGA, Energy Policy Act, PUHCA, and FCPA in the United States; and similar regimes in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Middle East, and across the globe.
- M&A and portfolio acquisitions in the commodity derivatives and energy trading sector.
- Expansions and launches of trading businesses often covering multiple jurisdictions and regions.
- Establishing new trading floors.
- Licensing requirements and other barriers to market access.
- Assisting with applications to regulators (e.g., authorizations and registrations, exemptions, and waivers) and for membership of exchanges and clearing houses.
- Advising on the optimum corporate and organizational structure for trading businesses.
- Advising on (and defending) dawn raids, regulatory enquiries, investigations (external or internal), and enforcement enquiries, and assisting with remediation exercises.
- Compliance audits and advising on and drafting compliance framework documentation.
- Algorithmic trading, HFT, direct electronic access, the use of AI, and the adoption and development of all kinds of FinTech solutions in the sector.
- Crypto-assets and commodity tokenizations.
- Advising on and documenting ETPs and ETCs, and similar.
- Advising on product development and new business lines.
- Market standard documentation platforms (including FIA futures documentation, ISDA derivatives documentation, EFET and EEI energy trading documentation), as well as emissions and renewables trading documentation.
- Advising on (physical and virtual) power purchase, gas supply, storage, tolling, energy management services, and similar agreements, including complex and bespoke transactions, including all kinds of new energy projects.
- Advising on LNG transactions and terminal use (access conditions and licensing and reporting requirements).
Advising and conducting due diligence on energy market design and local energy regimes. - Governance and organizational requirements.
- Netting and margining techniques.
- Clearing house and exchange regulations (including default processes and account structures).
- Capital requirements and related business structuring.
- Access to emissions auctions, registries, and related matters.
- Filings and reporting obligations to regulators.
- Horizon-scanning and engagement with legislators and policy-makers.
