Susan M. Curtis is co-head of Skadden’s Structured Finance Group. She represents fund managers, issuers and investment banks in a wide variety of capital markets transactions, asset-backed securities transactions and other structured financings and in restructuring and refinancing structured finance and derivative exposures.

Ms. Curtis has extensive experience with many asset classes and structures and public and private offerings of term asset-backed securities and asset-backed commercial paper supported by consumer assets (retail auto loans and leases and credit card receivables) as well as other financial assets (trade receivables, wholesale dealer inventory loans, investment grade and high-yield securities and loans, energy contracts and derivatives).

Ms. Curtis also has represented clients in developing a number of new and innovative transaction structures in the traditional consumer asset-backed securities and resecuritization arenas. Among these transactions are the first public auto lease titling trust structure and various CDO structures, including one of the very first CDOs.

Following the onset of the credit crisis, she has worked with clients seeking to restructure or refinance illiquid structured finance assets, including a “vertical slice” transaction to refinance assets held by a SIV through a new vehicle with a new capital structure. She also represented BlackRock as the asset manager and administrator for the three new structured vehicles created as part of the $32 billion Canadian asset-backed commercial paper restructuring of multiple non-bank conduits with exposure under leveraged super senior swaps, credit default swaps on CDOs and traditional securitizations. She has worked with clients in the establishment of TALF investment funds and in investing using TALF and in the establishment of a PPIP fund to invest in legacy MBS.

Most recently, Ms. Curtis led the representation of C12 Capital Management LP in its formation and its structuring and management of Protium Finance LP, a fund which purchased $12.3 billion in credit assets from Barclays as part of Barclays’ restructuring of a portion of its RMBS, whole mortgage loan and monoline-wrapped structured credit exposures.

Ms. Curtis repeatedly has been selected for inclusion in Chambers Global: The World’s Leading Lawyers for Business, Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business and The Best Lawyers in America. She led the team that in 2006 received the “Securitization Legal Team of the Year” award from the International Financial Law Review for work on one of the first partially unfunded hybrid cash/synthetic ABS CDOs.