Nobody goes into securitisation law to be popular.

We are not the people who unveil bold ideas or announce eye‑catching transactions. We are usually the ones asking whether something quite sensible might, in fact, go wrong. Preferably in writing.

If capital markets have traffic wardens, securitisation lawyers are probably it. Highly visible when we intervene, largely invisible when things flow smoothly, and not instinctively beloved by anyone keen to get home faster.

That description is not entirely unfair. We do slow things down. We ask uncomfortable questions at inconvenient moments. We have an irritating habit of insisting that structure matters, that words matter, and that “we’ll deal with it later” is not a strategy.

But markets do not create liquidity by being enthusiastic. They create liquidity by being trusted.

Securitisation exists precisely because assets, risk and capital do not naturally meet in the middle. Someone has to do the unglamorous work of making long, messy cashflows investable. Someone has to turn optimism into something that survives stress. That process is not intuitive, elegant or quick. It is structural.

When it works, nothing exciting happens. Liquidity appears. Investors stay invested. Balance sheets behave. The market moves on without really noticing why it could.

When it doesn’t, everyone suddenly becomes very interested in the plumbing.

So yes, securitisation lawyers can feel like the people telling you where you can and cannot park. We are not there to entertain. We are there to make sure traffic keeps moving after the rush hour has passed.

As Global ABS approaches, there will be plenty of discussion about innovation, growth and what comes next. That is as it should be. Markets run on ideas.

But they only scale on structure, and structure depends on the people in the room.

At some point in every transaction, the question stops being “can we do this?” and becomes “what happens if we do?”. That is the moment when the right lawyers are not the ones who move fastest or agree most readily, but the ones who are prepared to slow the room down just enough to ask the question no one else is asking.

The best securitisation lawyers are rarely the loudest. They are the ones who quietly spot where an assumption does too much work, where a risk has been hand‑waved rather than addressed, or where a deal will only function as long as conditions remain perfect. They are also the ones who can do that without making the process unbearable.

That combination matters more than people often realise.

When you are building structures intended to last through different cycles, different regulators and different market moods, you do not want someone who just says yes, nor someone who just says no. You want someone who understands why the question matters, who can explain it clearly, and who knows when not to push it further.

And, ideally, someone you do not dread being on a call with at midnight.

So if securitisation lawyers sometimes feel like the traffic wardens of finance, perhaps the better way of thinking about us is this: you do not notice the good ones because the journey feels uneventful. Things arrive where they are meant to. Detours have been thought through in advance. The road holds.

In capital markets, that is not a lack of drama. It is the whole point.