Emily Johnson advises corporate borrowers, boards of directors, and senior management teams on capital structure strategy, design, and execution.
Drawing on extensive borrower-side, issuer-focused experience, she integrates debt financing considerations with broader corporate strategy across complex transactions, including: mergers and acquisitions, spinoffs, strategic investments, restructurings, liability management exercises, and other transformative matters in both investment-grade and leveraged markets.
Emily understands the role that capital structure plays in driving resilience, flexibility, M&A capacity, and long-term shareholder value. She helps clients navigate an increasingly diversified capital landscape, working seamlessly across traditional bank and bond markets, equity-linked instruments, private credit, hybrid capital, and other alternative sources of financing.
She advises clients across a broad range of industries, including energy and infrastructure, sports and media, technology, communications, REITs, healthcare and life sciences, defense, industrials, transportation, and fashion.
Emily is widely acknowledged for her substantial experience in financing matters. Emily is ranked by Chambers USA for Banking & Finance and recognized by Legal 500. She has also been recognized by Law360, New York Law Journal, IFLR, The American Lawyer, Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers, MergerLinks, and Lawdragon.
Complementing her commercial work, Emily maintains an active pro bono practice. She serves on the boards of Her Justice, which provides free legal services to low-income women and children in New York City, and the Morehead-Cain Scholarship Fund at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation’s first merit-based scholarship program.
She has co-chaired a subcommittee of the New York State Attorney General’s Pro Bono Task Force for Reproductive Health. She was a David Rockefeller Fellow at the Partnership for New York City, and has served as pro bono counsel for the Partnership Fund, which invests in ventures that create jobs in underserved communities. She was also a Leadership Council on Legal Diversity Fellow.
Emily has served as a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School and is a regular guest lecturer at Duke University School of Law.
Prior to joining Latham, Emily was a partner at another global law firm.
Emily’s representative matters include all financing aspects for:
*Matter handled prior to joining Latham
The recognition honors a “burgeoning group of specialists [that] reflects the reality of the modern economy” and “find a way forward for companies.”