Law360 Profiles Rising Star Honoree Dan Lynch

Akin Gump global project finance partner Dan Lynch has been profiled by Law360 as a 2021 Rising Star.

Among the profile highlights:

• Most Challenging Deal: Helping Excelsior Energy Capital build industrial solar projects all over North America. Due, in part, to the challenge of how to streamline the process for clients so that the infrastructure pipeline, comprising larger and smaller projects, could be cost-effective, with smaller portions’ high costs not slowing down acquisition and building. His solution: streamlining all projects so that many parts were moving at once, thereby eliminating inefficiencies.
• Most Interesting Achievement: A cost calculator that helps cut down errors and ambiguities in communications between lawyers and finance-side workers. The tool helps sort through various derivative financial arrangements to help commercial users see the true costs and risks in different hedging strategies. Lynch says, “I think it's a really good introductory tool for legal departments or someone who has heard about hedges, and they think it's big and scary. It lets them go in and manipulate the different inputs and see how it affects the output.”
• Proudest Moment as a Lawyer: “[E]very time I close a deal.”
• What Motivates Him: Working to get resources flowing between parties so that everyone benefits, coupled with what he says is the incentive that his work on big renewables projects is making the world a better place. And the more deals he and others close, the more likely others will enter the market. He notes, “By reducing risk in renewable energy investments you make those investments more attractive, and you increase people wanting to get into the market for it. And that's the goal that renewable energy lawyers have.”