Rick Jones

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Richard D. Jones (“Rick”), co-chair of Dechert’s Finance and Real Estate group, focuses his practice on capital markets and mortgage finance. Mr. Jones was designated as a leading lawyer for real estate in the 2005-2009 editions of Chambers USA, a referral guide to leading lawyers in the United States based on the opinions of their clients and peers. Mr. Jones was described as “one of the savviest capital markets / mortgage finance lawyers in America’s real estate sector” in the 2007 edition of The Legal 500 (U.S.), which also named him one of New York’s top capital markets attorneys in its 2008 and 2009 editions. In addition he is listed in The Best Lawyers in America.

Mr. Jones recently received the Commercial Mortgage Securities Association’s (CMSA) Founders Award for his leadership. He has also received the Distinguished Service Award from the Mortgage Bankers Association of America (MBA) which is given annually to one person who has provided sustained and effective leadership to the industry.

Mr. Jones is past president of the CRE Finance Council; a founder of the Commercial Real Estate Institute (CRI); a member and past governor of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers and a former chair of its Capital Markets Committee; and a member of the Executive Committee of the Commercial Mortgage Board of Governors (COMBOG) of the MBA. Mr. Jones is a member of the Real Estate Roundtable, serving on its Capital and Credit Policy Advisory Committee. He also serves as the chairman of CRE Finance Council’s PAC as a member of the Commercial Real Estate Working Group of the Financial Services Roundtable, and on the MBA’s blue ribbon Council on Ensuring Mortgage Liquidity.

Mr. Jones is widely published and a frequent speaker on a wide range of issues affecting the capital markets and mortgage finance markets.

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LIBOR’s Winter is Coming

By Rick Jones on Posted in LIBOR Reform
God knows I’m as sick of LIBOR transition as you are and writing about it twice in quick succession is annoying, but I think necessary. Here’s the headline which I don’t think has gotten the visibility it deserves: LIBOR will largely end at the end of this year and not in the misty remove of … Continue Reading

SOFR Transition: It’s Not Done Yet!

By Rick Jones on Posted in LIBOR Reform
We’ve written before about our anxiety regarding the fact that SOFR does not really seem fit for purpose to support commercial mortgage lending or indeed any cash product.  (The nonsense about charging interest in arrears should have been a tell, to be honest.)  Of course, the real problem is the absence of a credit-sensitive component … Continue Reading

A Modest Proposal: Why Can’t CRE CLOs Be More Like Corporate CLOs?

By Rick Jones on Posted in Commercial Mortgage Finance, CRE CLO
Here at Dechert, we have market-leading practices in CRE CLO as well as corporate CLOs, including broadly syndicated and middle market structures.  So, every day that I peer into these two alternate universes, I’m astonished at how different these two fundamentally similar leverage technologies really are.  Certainly, even at a modest remove, they look pretty … Continue Reading

LIBOR: They Blinked!

By Rick Jones and Jonathan Gaynor on Posted in LIBOR Reform
My, my, my! Another governmental red line looks to be breached; at least this time no one gets hurt. We, at CrunchedCredit, have in some sense been carrying the government’s water about LIBOR transitions. We have been talking about how to prepare for transition, how to move current loan production onto a sound non-LIBOR basis … Continue Reading

Inexorably SOFR…But Hang On!

By Rick Jones on Posted in LIBOR Reform
Timing is everything.  I published a piece two weeks ago on LIBOR transition to SOFR and suggested that folks get on with it and embrace this flawed but seemingly inevitable new SOFR index.  Writing that piece, I thought of as rather an exercise in self-care, I just had to get beyond my annoyance with SOFR … Continue Reading

It’s Time to Initiate a SOFR Loan…Or Maybe Not

By Rick Jones on Posted in LIBOR
I wrote back in the early days of 2020, or as we call it now, the “Time Before,” that we thought it made sense for key market participants to consider an early move to SOFR pricing, not just as the backstop but as the interest rate of the loans.  Frankly, we were thinking about the … Continue Reading

CMBS On The Perp Walk: We Are Being Set Up!

By Rick Jones on Posted in CMBS, Commercial Real Estate, Financial Reform, Risk Retention, Securitization, Structured Finance
Folks, last week I made the point that it’s extremely important to confront negative narratives about our industry before they take hold, creep into the interstices between things that are true and then somehow ossified into received wisdom.  So, taking on board my own advice, which shockingly I find compelling, I want to sound the … Continue Reading

The Thoughts of (Chairman) Zell

By Rick Jones on Posted in Credit Crisis
I had the opportunity to interview Sam Zell last week on an iGlobal podcast. You can see it here. Fascinating.  Okay, Mr. Zell might not be the undisputed master of 1.4 billion souls whose thoughts are obligatory reading, but his Thoughts should be accorded considerable weight by us denizens of the US economy.  There’s a … Continue Reading

“I Was Just Following Orders”

By Rick Jones on Posted in CMBS, COVID-19, Financial Reform, Real Estate, Regulatory Complexity, Securitization, Structured Finance
My last commentary, Playing with Broken Toys in Coronavirus Land, touched on the notion that sometimes following rules can guarantee a bad outcome.  I’ll leave more important musings about ethics and morality aside here (I still don’t have a clue about what Kant was nattering on about) and focus on the more mundane question of … Continue Reading

CECL: The Ugly Pig Running Out of Lipstick

By Theeya Musitief, Rick Jones and Jonathan Gaynor on Posted in CECL, Regulatory Capital
Here is something helpful that has surfaced amidst the fallout, pain and confusion of the global COVID-19 crisis.  The implementation date for the all-too-simple in theory but not-simple-at-all in practice CECL accounting standard has been pushed back by the passage of the CARES Act for banks until the COVID-19 national emergency declared by the president … Continue Reading

Life in the Time of Conferences: CREFC, CREF and SFA

By Rick Jones, Edward (Ted) Stack and Ella-Marie Smith on Posted in CREFC, CREFC Annual Conference
With apologies to Mr. Marquez for repurposing the title of his haunting book, it’s conference season here in CRE and ABS securitization-land and therefore a time to reflect (more Marquez) on the risks that the world will become more disorderly, or whether we will progress gently from a perfectly fine 2019 to 2020.  We attended … Continue Reading

It’s Time to Originate a SOFR Loan! Really!

By Rick Jones and Jonathan Gaynor on Posted in LIBOR
It is time to start originating Single Asset Single Borrower (SASB) large loans priced on SOFR.  There, I said it.  Not just LIBOR indexed loans containing a SOFR fall back when LIBOR inevitably goes away, but new loans indexed to Compounded SOFR, implementing all the necessary tweaks to documents, systems and processes to make that … Continue Reading
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