Bronwen May

Counsel

Bronwen May is a counsel in O'Melveny's Hong Kong office where she is a member of the Firm's Corporate Finance Practice. She focuses on banking, derivative and structured products in both live and distressed situations, restructurings, and insolvency.

Bronwen has extensive experience advising major US, European, and Asian banks, ECAs, hedge funds, equity investors, insolvency practitioners, turnaround specialists, steering committees, and public and private corporations on a variety of derivative, banking, and restructuring matters, including:

• Termination and close-out of derivative positions, especially in times of market stress. 
• Derivative documentation for counterparties in the UK, Europe, America and jurisdictions across Asia, including Hong Kong, the PRC, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore (including IRS, FX transactions, TRS, CDS, collateral documentation, precedents for in-house use, non-vanilla confirmations for bespoke transactions and trades in emerging markets). 
• Extensive experience of restructurings and contentious and non-contentious insolvency matters, including compulsory liquidations, provisional liquidations, CVLs, schemes of arrangement, receiverships and administrators. Bronwen also has a great deal of experience of matters with a cross-border element, particularly in China. 
• Representation of clients in multi-bank, cross-border restructurings, including advising insolvency practitioners, steering committees and individual creditors.
• Advising on security enforcement and asset recovery. 
• Advising on debt trading and the acquisition of distressed assets, including debt, equity and the acquisition of par, distressed, and non-performing assets in the PRC. 
• Advising on a wide range of finance and structured products, including finance and security documents, cash and synthetic CDOs, CLOs, and CLNs , including advising in recent times of market stress on structured retail notes, termination of swap arrangements, early redemption, and impact on underlying collateral. 

Prior to working at O’Melveny & Myers, Bronwen gained extensive in-house experience as Head of Legal at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson in Hong Kong and at Paribas in Tokyo. This included providing transaction and legal support for the sales and trading desks (equity derivatives, fixed income and credit derivatives) and for structured products desks.

She has lectured extensively on a variety of topics relating to OTC derivatives and insolvency matters.

Professional Activities

Admitted, Hong Kong; England & Wales
Member, Law Society of Hong Kong, Law Society of England & Wales; ISDA AsiaPac Legal & Regulatory Sub-Committee; International Women's Insolvency & Restructuring Confederation
Author, "China's Iron Rice Bowl Remoulded," Journal of the American Bankruptcy Institute, (Vol. XXV, No. 9, p.40)