Douglas Donahue

Practice Areas

Doug heads the U.S. Derivatives practice in Linklaters’ New York office. He represents both buy and sell-side institutions, including dealers, banks, and hedge funds, in connection with the development, structuring, negotiation and documentation of a wide variety of financial products. These products include total return swaps, swap intermediations, credit derivatives, interest rate swaps, commodity swaps, currency swaps and other funded and unfunded products. In addition to Doug’s robust transactional practice, he also advises clients on regulatory issues, particularly those arising in the wake of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Doug also frequently represents the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc. (“ISDA”) on industry initiatives. He has been at the forefront of regulatory driven changes to the derivatives market, representing ISDA on all of their major Dodd-Frank initiatives since 2012, including advising ISDA and IHSMarkit on the creation, design and development of ISDA Amend (a joint-venture online platform that has transformed the ISDA protocol process and has over 100,000 users).

Work Highlights

Doug is leading Linklaters’ partnership with ISDA on the development of ISDA Create. ISDA Create is an online platform that allows market participants to create, negotiate and execute ISDA documentation completely online. ISDA Create is revolutionizing the way in which market participants put in place ISDA documentation. Linklaters and ISDA also recently launched an integration with S&P Global Intelligence’s Counterparty Manager suite of products, giving firms the ability to easily access full details of their contractual relationships in digital form from a single location.

Doug’s efforts to revolutionize the contract creation, negotiation and execution process are not limited to ISDA documentation. Doug is also leading Linklaters’ efforts to bring the technology underpinning ISDA Create to other markets (e.g., repurchase agreements and stock lending, infrastructure and banking, among others) with CreateiQ - Linklaters’ proprietary contract automation platform.

Clients currently utilizing ISDA Create and/or CreateiQ include: HSBC, BNY Mellon, BlackRock, PIMCO, Goldman Sachs, DE Shaw & Co., BNP Paribas, European Investment Fund, Morgan Stanley, Citi and Green Climate Fund, among others.

Some of Doug’s recent work for ISDA includes:

- the drafting and structuring of ISDA’s first definitional booklet and trade confirmations for digital assets and the development of model provisions for the transfer of digital assets as collateral pursuant to ISDA’s collateral documentation;

- their development of credit support documentation intended to help market participants comply with the initial margin requirements imposed by regulators around the globe;

- developing the infrastructure and drafting documentation for repurchase transactions and stock loans to be documented under the ISDA Master Agreement;

- the development of the ISDA Clause Library.

- the drafting of the 2021 ISDA Interest Rate Definitions (ISDA’s first natively digital definitional booklet); and

- ISDA’s efforts around interest rate reform and EU benchmark regulation.

Awards