Energy and Infrastructure

At Crowell & Moring U.K. LLP, our energy and infrastructure lawyers leverage our extensive capabilities and decades-long experience to successfully navigate commercial, regulatory, and policy challenges across numerous sectors. Operating across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and North America, our multidisciplinary team—in conjunction with our colleagues based in Brussels, Doha, Washington, D.C., New York, and beyond—offers a complete range of services in project finance, public-private partnerships (PPP, or P3), infrastructure finance, and development financing.

Focused counsel at every step, for every client

 Through our experience with major infrastructure and other complex construction projects, we are also able to advise at all stages of a project’s lifecycle, from project development through to financial close and handback/expiry. We regularly help clients identify and mitigate potential disputes during the earliest stages of project planning and investment strategy and at every step thereafter, including financing, delivery structure (for P3s and other arrangements), procurement, construction, testing and commissioning, operations, maintenance, and other post-construction issues.

We advise UK and international clients from across the spectrum, including seasoned contractors, infrastructure funds, P3 project companies, governments, and lenders. We have represented clients in private and government-backed energy and infrastructure transactions, government contracts, and disputes across Asia, North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. 

We routinely help clients:

• Assess their core strengths, offerings, and value propositions, including navigating initial structuring, advising on partnership models and project development. Our experience includes the development of greenfield projects from the concept or bidding stage; analysing tender documents and assisting in the preparation of bids; negotiating consortium and joint development agreements; and negotiating and preparing the full range of project documentation, including engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contracts, sub-contracts, supply agreements, operation and maintenance (O&M) contracts, services agreements, and concession and offtake agreements.
• Understand the design, construction and testing and commissioning processes. Our lawyers have extensive experience structuring, drafting, and negotiating standard-form contracts and bespoke contracts for use in major construction and engineering projects, as well as ancillary matters such as bonds, guarantees, and warranties.
• Navigate issues and claims that arise on complex projects to effectively reduce and mitigate disputes. Among other strategies, we have developed creative ways to resolve disputes without resorting to litigation or arbitration. In the event that arbitration or litigation become unavoidable, our top-ranked, London-based team and network of Crowell litigators worldwide handle proceedings in a variety of languages, across a range of industries, under all major arbitral regimes, in UK courts at every level, and in jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, South Africa, New Zealand, the United States, and the EU.
• Negotiate financing (including project finance), investment, and other agreements with partners and collaborators. We routinely advise clients on all aspects of asset-based lending (including equipment, inventory, and receivables finance), factoring arrangements, company voluntary arrangements, acquisition finance, and intellectual property (IP) finance. We handle the negotiation, structuring, and documentation of sophisticated commercial loans and credit products, many of which involve multi-lender, syndicated secured credit facilities and are documented in the form of revolving loans, term loans, unitranche loans, first and second lien loans, and letter of credit facilities.
• Address a wide variety of operational issues on infrastructure and energy projects in the UK and elsewhere, including refinancings, disputes, defects, and variations, together with expiry and handback.
• Acquire assets on a secondary market basis in an infrastructure context. We have particular experience advising infrastructure funds on P3 secondary market transactions in Europe and North America. Our team has the capabilities and resources to advise on all aspects of a large-scale acquisition, including due diligence and contract efficiencies, consents and regulatory issues, and sale and purchase agreements.

We have represented clients on a broad range of energy and infrastructure projects across sectors, including:

• Energy, including district heating; electric vehicle charging facilities; energy from waste, biomass, combined heat and power, hydro, hydrogen, wind, and solar; electricity transmission and distribution facilities; energy storage and efficiency.
• Transport, including roads, bridges, highways, light and heavy (including high-speed) rail, ports, airports, and electric vehicles.
• Water and waste, including water supply and water treatment (including desalination).
• Social infrastructure, including schools, student accommodation, social housing, hospitals, and primary healthcare schemes.