Corporate finance for lawyers (1st edition) By Rolef de Weijs, Joost de Vries, Aart Jonkers, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. 2023. pp. viii and 300. £120. ISBN: 978‐2‐03530‐202‐4

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• Author: Paul Omar
• Date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/iir.1509

BOOK REVIEW

Corporate finance for lawyers (1st edition)

By Rolef de Weijs, Joost de Vries, Aart Jonkers, Cheltenham:

Edward Elgar. 2023. pp. viii and 300. £120. ISBN: 978-2-03530-202-4

Paul Omar, Editor, International Insolvency Review

This new text explores the complex and intricate relationship between law and corporate

finance. Its aim is stated as being to understand the power balance between three key groups in

the company: equity providers (shareholders) and both types of capital providers (secured and

unsecured creditors). Across eight lucidly-written chapters, the work explores the connection

between law and corporate finance, value creation through leveraging, company valuations,

discounted valuations and cash-flow analyses, secured credit, hybrid finance, shareholder

guarantees and the role of finance in reorganisation processes.

The titles of each of the chapters also reveal essential concerns, from the pre-eminence of cash

in company valuations, the need to retrace the cash in discounted valuations and cash-flow ana-

lyses, through the debate about productive and non-productive credit in the context of secured

credit, all the way to the role(s) of shareholders in hybrid finance and guarantee scenarios. Further

breakdowns of each topic are available in the contents section that take the reader on a journey

through the detail of each topic, its stakeholders, the legal, accounting, and other issues framing

theconceptsaswellastheoutcomes,asfarastheycanbeascertained.Theworkalsotakesona

comparative character, in that it addresses the legal rules in several jurisdictions where corporate

financial practice is important and seeks to compare approaches wherever relevant.

In the way the authors intend, this is a text that addresses itself to lawyers and purports to

explain the intricacies of corporate finance in sufficient detail to enable lawyers, as company

advisers and counsel, to appreciate the needs of their clients. As such, in proceeding through

the chapters, the material in the text logically combines to provide an introduction to corporate

finance, all the way from basic building blocks of corporate finance, as expressed in important

concepts and definitions, such as “Enterprise Value”,“Equity Value”,“EBITDA”etc, to key

mechanisms in modern finance dissected from both financial and legal perspectives, thus offer-

ing the legally-trained an insight into the type of documentary and forensic analysis of the

accounts and projections that would be necessary during the life cycle of the corporation, from

inception, through growth, to economic and financial distress, some of which will turn out to

be end of life issues.

An interesting feature of the text, as outlined in the first chapter, is its use of the “Financial

Mindmap”idea throughout with financial concepts and ideas being depicted, and thus

Received: 2 August 2023 Accepted: 2 August 2023

DOI: 10.1002/iir.1509

© 2023 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

578 Int Insolv Rev. 2023;32:578–579.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/iir