Practices

Y. Daphne Coelho-Adam is counsel in the Global Banking and Corporate Trust Group.

Daphne joined Seward & Kissel in 2001. Her practice focuses on representing clients in both par and distressed secondary market transactions. In particular, she has extensive experience with distressed investments in bank debt, bankruptcy trade claims, and distressed securities. Daphne regularly represents banks, broker-dealers, hedge funds, investment advisors and other entities in secondary market transactions related to both U.S. and international assets. She advises clients with respect to various legal issues in the secondary market, including issues arising in connection with loan credit default swaps and total return swaps on bank loans. Daphne assists clients with the preparation, negotiation and review of the transaction documents, including due diligence review, and provides clients with advice and analysis on bank credit agreements, security documents, intercreditor arrangements and other finance documents.

Daphne is a member of Seward & Kissel’s LIBOR Transition Task Force, a highly focused and specialized cross-disciplinary team advising clients in the loan, securitization and derivatives markets as they work to adopt and implement replacement benchmarks for LIBOR. In connection with this effort, she co-authored a chapter in The International Comparative Legal Guide to: Lending & Secured Finance 2019 titled, “SOFR So Good? The Transition Away from LIBOR Begins in the United States.”

Daphne also has experience working on complex financial transactions, including restructuring transactions both in a judicial and non-judicial setting. In particular, she has represented trustees and securities administrators in connection with the exercise of repurchase provisions and enforcement rights in mortgage-backed securitization transactions and related litigation and has also represented trustees, collateral agents, lenders and other service providers in domestic and international default and workout situations, including experience working on some of the largest restructurings of complex structured finance transactions. Daphne is also a member of the Firm’s Energy Finance Restructuring Team.

Daphne is an active member of the Loan Syndication and Trading Association and the Loan Market Association, serving on the LSTA Trade Practices and Forms Committee and the LSTA Women’s Committee. Daphne also frequently serves on other committees and participates in working-groups involved in the preparation of market documentation.

Daphne received a B.A. from the University of Virginia, and a J.D. from Vanderbilt University Law School. Daphne was a member of the Moot Court Board and on the editorial staff of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, where she also served as the Executive Student Authorities Editor. She authored a Note, titled “Fishing for the Smoking Gun: The Need for British Courts to Grant American-Style Extraterritorial Discovery Requests in U.S. Industry-Wide Tort Actions,” 33 Vand. J. Transnat’l L. 1225 (2000).

Daphne is a member of the Advisory Board of Animal Haven, a non-profit organization founded in 1967, which finds homes for abandoned cats and dogs throughout the Tri-State area and operates a shelter in Manhattan. Daphne previously served on the Board of Directors of Children of Bellevue, a non-profit organization founded in 1949 to initiate, fund and develop programs to improve the health and well-being of children at Bellevue Hospital.

Publications