Kim Desmarais has successfully acted as lead counsel on complex U.S. and cross-border financings across a broad range of industries for two decades. She has a strong leveraged lending background and represents borrowers, banks, private credit funds, commercial finance companies, and other institutional lenders in a variety of secured and unsecured transactions, with a particular focus on acquisition finance, asset-based loans, and alternative lending transactions in the funds and fintech sectors, as well as liability management transactions. Kim is regularly asked to advise on lending arrangements involving crypto assets and companies in the digital assets industry and is actively involved in Jones Day's global Fintech Working Group. She is also co-coordinator of Jones Day's global, cross-disciplinary IBOR Transition Working Group.
Kim also has extensive experience advising on personal property and other commercial law matters associated with secured financing transactions, with special emphasis on Articles 8 and 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). She was an Observer of the Joint Committee of the ALI and ULC responsible for the drafting of the 2022 Amendments to the UCC to address emerging technologies.
Kim is a Fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers and has served as secretary of the New York City Bar's Commercial Law and Uniform State Laws Committee.
Experience
- Brooklyn Law School (J.D. cum laude 2001; Vice President and Editor, Moot Court Honor Society); University of California, San Diego (B.A. in Economics and Political Science 1996)
- New York
- IFLR1000: notable practitioner in banking