Friday, Eldredge & Clark provides guidance and assistance to banks, broker-dealers, mortgage lenders, and other providers of financial products. We offer our financial services clients a full range of legal services, including regulatory advocacy, dispute resolution, litigation, and transactional support involving mergers and acquisitions, commercial lending, real estate purchases and sales.
Client focus
- Commercial and community banks
- Insurance carriers
- Consumer finance and mortgage companies
- Securities broker-dealers
Services to banking clients
Commercial lending
Our lawyers have a clear understanding of how to protect the lender’s interests within a borrower’s comfort level on a wide range of lending transactions. That includes revolving loans, term loans, revolving and term-loan packages, multiple borrower transactions, loan participations, acquisition loans, letter of credit facilities, and special purpose loans. We help our clients comply with the Uniform Commercial Code as well as the requirements for proper collateral protection in the event of default or bankruptcy.
Regulation
From the Fair Housing Act and Equal Credit Opportunity Act to the requirements of the Bank Secrecy and USA Patriot Acts, our lawyers understand the federal regulatory regime and work to help keep our clients stay in compliance. At the state level, we offer full support in bank examinations by the Arkansas State Bank Department as well as state regulatory compliance.
Services to insurance clients
Regulation
Insurance companies rely upon Friday, Eldredge & Clark to represent their interests in regulatory and transactional matters before the Arkansas Insurance Department. We assist our clients with the full range of concerns that come within the Insurance Commissioner’s authority to review and regulate operations, change of ownership approval, new product approval, and report filing.
Coverage issues
We evaluate insurance policies on behalf of both the insurance carrier and the insured, reviewing and assessing all types of coverage written. Clients rely on us to prepare coverage opinions involving comprehensive general liability policies, policies on environmental matters, professional liability, excess insurance, endorsements, exclusions, and a number of other issues.
Services to broker-dealers
We handle litigation and arbitration of customer disputes alleging inappropriate investment and trading strategies by securities broker-dealers, and are well versed in dispute resolution before panels of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and its predecessor body, the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD). Our litigators have also regularly represented broker-dealers before those panels, in customer disputes as well as controversies involving non-competition and non-solicitation contract provisions.
