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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It’s the Inflation, Stupid

By Rick Jones on Posted in Financial Reform, Regulatory Complexity
We certainly have an abundance of bad bits and bobs out there right now, don’t we?  War, pestilence, chubby dictators with rockets, buff dictators without souls, miscellaneous threats to world peace.  It’s everywhere.  Nonetheless, my take remains (see my prior blog, Prognosticator’s Regret) that, at least for our economy, all that doesn’t matter so much … Continue Reading

The Coming Regulatory Deluge (With Apologies to Louis XV):  Smells Like Opportunity to Me

By Rick Jones on Posted in Financial Reform, Regulatory
Events keep happening that really do make it clear that we are about to enter a period of enhanced regulatory intrusion into the financial services space.  Shocking!  And entirely unexpected, right?  (You’re winning, sir)  While that is in many respects troubling, it’s also the stuff of opportunity for the creative and nimble.  I’ll explain.… Continue Reading

Prognosticators’ Regret

By Rick Jones on Posted in CRE CLO
Just a few weeks back, I penned a sunny and optimistic piece about the growth of the CRE CLO market in 2022 and by implication, the general amicable economic conditions on which the growth of that technology would depend.  Being your basic risk-adverse type, I, of course, conditioned and limited my happy talk by excluding … Continue Reading

The CRE CLO Unleashed

By Rick Jones on Posted in CRE CLO
Our fine little CRE CLO business has exploded over the past couple of years, hasn’t it?  Last year, around this time, I recklessly predicted for my friends at Commercial Mortgage Alert that we might hit $30 billion of issuance in 2021.   I was the outlier…by a lot.  Well, it looks like we’ll finish the year … Continue Reading

2021 Golden Turkeys

By Rick Jones on Posted in Golden Turkey Awards
Welcome, dear reader, to our annual Golden Turkey Awards.  But for my commitment to absolute fairness and concern over the appearance of impropriety, I would have awarded the first Golden Turkey Award to Dechert for actually getting the Golden Turkey Awards done this year.  What a crazy year end.  The market is insane. On the … Continue Reading

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
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