Cadence Bank and McGlinchey’s “Focused Support Team”

When Cadence Bank needed help with several complex banking matters, Deputy General Counsel Raja Khalaf called a McGlinchey lawyer he had worked with before. “Not everyone in Birmingham handles treasury management matters, and I knew Chris Couch at McGlinchey could.”

Over the years, as Cadence’s needs have expanded, lawyers in other key areas were added to the team: contract review, electronic banking, regulatory compliance, bank regulatory advice, privacy and data security, asset-based lending, syndication of loans and loan sales, workouts of troubled loans, and regular, collateral-based commercial and industrial lending.

McGlinchey’s national footprint has proven valuable to Cadence.  “They have a presence in New York,” Raja notes, “which is critical when you’re dealing with some of our vendors in the financial technology industry who don’t want to waive their forum selection clauses in contracts.  They don’t want to agree to your jurisdiction, which means you land in New York to get counsel.”

With Cadence’s expanding variety of needs, and with McGlinchey’s 140+ lawyers working in financial services law, a more strategic approach to client access and service made sense.  To do that, McGlinchey formed a Focused Support Team (FST) of lawyers to fully understand Cadence’s business operations and goals and to be an on-call, frontline service team supporting Cadence.

“Raja and I have a close working relationship,” Chris says, “but it’s important that he and his team be able to get the answers they need without every query coming through me.  With the Focused Support Team, the in-house team at Cadence has a short list of McGlinchey lawyers who know the Cadence organization and can respond quickly to the bank’s needs in a wide variety of areas – issues related to the holding company, regulatory compliance, and litigation for both the consumer and commercial sides of the bank, deposit operations and treasury management, workouts, and restructuring – just to mention a few.”

“If you’re an in-house lawyer,” Raja says, “you need an answer yesterday. When I go to McGlinchey, I get answers. They have depth in terms of subject matter in which they are leaders. People there excel in a huge range of specialties – from consumer lending programs to deposits, payment systems, and treasury management, from product documentation to the UCC, from anti-money laundering to corporate governance and privacy, from vendor management and technology contracts to affiliate transactions – they know the business of banking.”

“I consistently feel like McGlinchey lawyers are invested in our success,” he adds, “as much as anybody can be on the outside of my organization.”