Norton Rose Fulbright is the worthy recipient of the IJGlobal Legal Adviser of the Year Award for deals closed across the 2019 calendar year, having impressed all 4 independent judging teams with the law firm’s performance.

Judges in London, New York, Singapore and Dubai singled out NFR for “stellar” performance having closed more project finance deals than any other law firm – according to the IJGlobal database – cornering a global market share of 4.5%, by value.

Among comments from the judges, the APAC team was particularly keen to single NRF out for “really unusual new infra-style deals” while others tipped their hats to the firm for a “diversified” spread of transactions, some of which were in “very challenging countries”.

One judge went as far as to say that the firm “demonstrates capabilities beyond your expectations and leverages experienced teams with specialist skills to get results and win deals”.

NRF was far from alone in submitting the refinance of Scotland’s Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm as a key deal it had acted on. In truth, any law firm that had exposure to offshore wind submitted them, to the point that such an exciting sector became a tad humdrum for the judges!

Much like for the previous year’s awards, judges refused to take into account projects’ scale, rather preferring to identify how the firm had brought value to the deal, going beyond the scope of normal work.

The £4.1 billion refi of Beatrice definitely ticked this box as NRF acted for the consortium of lenders – 29 commercial and institutional lenders and 24 hedging banks. This was one of the first instances where the lender selection process was managed using full form documentation rather than a term sheet, which increased the complexity of managing such a large lender group.

Another such project was the Tina River Hydro Development in the Solomon Islands where K-water is building a power generation dam near Honiara with a capacity of 7 million cubic metres of water and a hydroelectric power plant with a capacity of 20MW.

NRF teams in Australia (EPC) and Singapore (PPA and implementation) had their work cut out given this was the first large-scale infrastructure project to be developed as a PPP in the Solomon Islands. They also negotiated and drafted the shareholder agreement and on-lending agreement.

Then you have Kacific 1 that was handled by the NRF Singapore office and involved the financing of a next-generation geostationary satellite operating in the Ka-band frequency spectrum. This satellite is streaming low-cost, high-speed, reliable and stable satellite broadband via 56 powerful spot beams.

As one judge said: “That’s a long way from being a run-of-the mill project.” Its high-speed broadband payload and wide-reaching coverage will deliver broadband services to the Pacific Islands and other remote communities such as Bhutan and Nepal.

The above are just 3 of the law firm’s greatest achievements in 2019, but the diverse nature of their exposure to infrastructure and energy saw the firm act on all sorts of deals that ranged from battery storage in Kauai, Hawaii – at the time the largest solar and storage system in the world – to Sabine Pass LNG, Train 6.

Energy played a key – though not exclusive – part in NRF’s submissions with the firm having acted on the challenging 378MW Acajutla gas-fired power plant and LNG terminal in El Salvador, and the 270MWAC Potrero solar farm in Jalisco, Mexico, sponsored by Fotowatio Renewable Ventures.

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