Paula Howard, a Partner in Locke Lord’s London office, has a broad-based cross border finance practice advising banks and international financial institutions on a variety of bilateral, syndicated, secured and unsecured facilities. More recently she has been involved in a number of significant equity investment projects in Poland and Russia and has experience in the telecommunications sector, oil and gas, real estate and project finance, acting on a number of major developments in Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Belarus and Ukraine.
In the UK, Paula is a leading specialist in consumer credit and asset finance and her clients include a number of well-known finance houses, banks and credit card providers and payday loan finance companies. Having worked in-house on secondment to a leading finance company, Paula not only provides legal support but is commercial in approach and can add significant value on strategy and direction. Paula has considerable experience in data protection (both UK and cross border) and is a member of the Finance and Leasing Association’s Compliance Group. She provides in-house training for clients and regularly lectures on consumer credit and data protection.
Paula complements her consumer finance practice with specialist regulatory knowledge in the niche sector of financial services, acting on matters from prepaid and credit cards to government benefits, outsourcing and multinational commercial card deals, from payment processing and account aggregation to merchant acquiring and card issuing and from national gift card and closed loop networks to full white label card solutions and cross merchant incentive card and payroll schemes. More recently, she has been advising clients on the Payment Services Regulations.
Paula is recognised by Chambers UK, A Client's Guide to the Legal Profession which describes her as a leading individual in consumer and asset finance and a "good legal analyst" and comments that [she] complements her consumer and asset finance practice with substantial expertise in data protection matters.
Education
- College of Law, London, 1992
Solicitors' Finals Examination - LL.B., (Hons.), Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London - Law, 1991
Languages