Vanessa Bateau Smyth is an associate in Ropes & Gray's corporate department. Vanessa practices primarily in the firm's finance group and represents a wide variety of clients, including fund clients on fund level financings, including NAV facilities, subscription facilities, leverage facilities for credit funds, management company lines to investment advisors and employee co-investment loan programs in complex leveraged finance transactions, including asset-based financings, private capital financing transactions and capital call facilities.
While in law school, Vanessa was a senior staff member of the William & Mary Business Law Review and served as a judicial extern for the Honorable David J. Novak of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
During the seven years prior to law school, Vanessa worked for a top media network in brand creative promotion as the network’s operations and media manager, and witnessed firsthand how the legal and business departments collaborated to ensure compliance with copyright law and content guidelines for on-air, print, and digital platforms.
Experience
- Representing FB Debt Financing Guarantor, LLC and certain of its subsidiaries (“Forma Brands”), a builder of top beauty brands including Morphe®, Morphe 2®, Jaclyn Cosmetics®, and Born Dreamer®, in their Chapter 11 cases to address approximately $870 million of funded indebtedness, facilitate a going-concern 363 sale transaction for substantially all assets, and resolve numerous complex licensing and potential litigation issues.