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"Uncapped" is the holy grail for borrowers but not so much for lenders Cost savings add-back prevalence ranged from 20% to 55% of deals over nine quarters, with no consistent pattern. Uncapped add-backs nearly disappeared, falling from 20% of add-back deals in Q3 2023 to 0% in Q3 2024. Generous caps and long look-forward periods still give borrowers real flexibility even without going uncapped. By Dan Wertman, originally published on the Noetica blog, now part of Thomson Reuters.

Most creditors want to see a borrower succeed, because that's how they get repaid. "Net short" lenders break that logic entirely — and after the Windstream case made the risk impossible to ignore, protections against it briefly vanished from the market before staging a comeback. Net short lender protections disappeared completely from publicly filed high-yield credit agreements in Q3 2024. By Q1 2025, those protections had rebounded to 8% of credit deals.

What one hidden line of white text reveals about trust, AI, and the future of legal filings. As artificial intelligence becomes more common in legal workflows, a new challenge is emerging: documents can be written not only for the people reading them, but also for the AI systems analyzing them. Legal professionals are relying on AI to summarize filings, review evidence, and surface relevant information, creating new opportunities for others to attempt to influence those systems.

Most credit agreements test covenant compliance whenever a borrower actually uses its credit — not just when it first qualified. Limited Condition Transaction terms change that, and they're becoming more common in acquisition financing. LCT terms let borrowers lock in covenant compliance at signing, even if the numbers shift before the deal closes months later. 25% of publicly filed high-yield credit agreements included LCT terms in Q3 2024, up from 23% in Q3 2023.

How one court case rewrote credit agreement boilerplate almost overnight Citibank mistakenly wired Revlon's lenders roughly $900 million instead of an $7.8 million interest payment in 2020. A court initially ruled some lenders could keep the money under a 'discharge for value' defense, before an appeals court later reversed that decision.

Borrower tactics for liability management transactions trigger a corresponding lender protection. Here's what two years of deal data show about that arms race. J.Crew blockers rose from 15% of deals in Q1 2023 to 38% in Q2 2025; anti-Serta protections reached 85% of deals. Omniblockers — a 'poison pill' for all liability management transactions — appeared in only 4% of 2025 issuances. Warner Bros.

Inside the five-dimensional turnaround that took one firm from stalled adoption to measurable competitive advantage. A law firm's AI transformation required honest assessment across five dimensions to achieve measurable competitive advantage. Strategic alignment, data readiness, technology enablement, risk management, and culture were all critical to driving adoption. Firms that bridge the gap between leadership vision and operational reality are positioned to lead in the AI era.

44% of corporate professionals say their daily work doesn't align with company strategy. 30% of professionals experiencing execution gaps are considering leaving within two years. The numbers tell a stark story. According to our latest Future of Professionals Report, 44% of corporate professionals working at companies with a stated strategy say their day-to-day practice doesn’t match it.

Lenders are discovering what New Yorkers already know: majority rule means the best part of your investment might disappear. Only 38% of publicly filed high-yield credit agreements protected against lien subordination in all of 2023. That protection spiked to a two-year peak of 64% of deals in Q4 2024. It settled at 52% in Q1 2025, still up 17 points year-over-year from Q1 2024. By Dan Wertman, originally published on the Noetica blog, now part of Thomson Reuters. April and July 2025.

You thought it was for shareholder treats. Now it's funding debt you didn't price. Jump to ↓ The trick in the covenant A term to watch Available Restricted Payment Capacity baskets let borrowers repurpose dividend capacity into new, often pari-ranking debt. Noetica found no instances of the term in publicly filed high-yield credit agreements in Q3 2024 or Q3 2023. The term remains largely confined to sponsor deals, but private-market terms often creep into liquid credit markets over time.