The future has become remarkably impatient. Waiting for money to arrive now feels almost old-fashioned.
If you've sold a business but won't receive the proceeds for another three years, why wait? If a football club knows broadcasting revenue is coming next season, why not borrow against it today? If a satellite will generate income for the next decade, why shouldn't it fund itself before it even reaches orbit?
Modern finance has developed an extraordinary ability to pull tomorrow into today. The question isn't what an asset is anymore.
It's what lawyers can do to define them as such.
For centuries, collateral was reassuringly tangible.
Land. Buildings. Ships. Machinery.
You could point at it.
Increasingly, however, value lives somewhere less obvious. It exists inside contracts, intellectual property, media rights and predictable future cashflows. The economy has become intangible and finance has had little choice but to follow.
Laura spends much of her time helping lenders become comfortable with assets that barely resemble traditional security.
Take the entrepreneur who's sold their company. The purchase price won't arrive immediately because much of it is tied to future vesting. Unfortunately, life has a habit of refusing to wait for deferred consideration. Houses are bought. Tax bills arrive. New businesses need funding.
The obvious solution is borrowing against those future payments. Except they're only valuable if someone can prove they'll actually materialise and that's where the law performs one of its cleverest tricks.
Lawyers don't simply protect assets anymore. They help create and define them.
A carefully analysed sale agreement can transform an uncertain promise into something lenders are willing to advance millions against.
The same principle explains why sports finance and space finance belong in the same conversation even if they sound like the opening line of a pub quiz.
Sport used to be about stadiums and training grounds. Today it's increasingly about future transfer fees, broadcasting income, sponsorship rights and intellectual property. Strip away the headlines and you're lending against contractual cashflows rather than bricks and mortar.
Space sounds dramatically different.
It isn't.
Behind the rockets and launch footage sits another infrastructure business built around long-term revenues. Satellites provide communications, data and connectivity to places conventional infrastructure struggles to reach. Once in orbit, they become remarkably predictable commercial assets.
One client may be financing Premier League receivables. Another may be funding satellite networks across East Africa. Legally, they're asking remarkably similar questions.
Can future income be trusted? Can it be valued? Can someone lend against it?
Commercial law has become the vehicle to ensure the answer is yes.
Space carries a resurgent glamour, which partly explains why family offices have become increasingly interested. Oil wealth has always funded infrastructure projects. The only thing that's changed is the altitude.
Alongside institutional investors searching for yields, private wealth has been looking for opportunities that are commercially attractive, genuinely scarce and if we're honest, fun to talk about over dinner.
A satellite has a novelty that another commercial property portfolio simply doesn't and people with extraordinary wealth enjoy investing in things that feel extraordinary.
Meanwhile, governments remain heavily involved in the sector. Launch capability, national security and satellite infrastructure all introduce political considerations that rarely trouble an office development. Independence itself becomes commercially valuable, making privately funded launches increasingly attractive.
The final frontier has become just another asset class.
For all the innovation surrounding private credit, the oldest form of security remains most effective.
Reputation.
Laura points out that many relationship-driven lenders have little appetite for enforcement. Repossessing assets is expensive. Worse, it damages relationships. Word travels quickly in private wealth circles.
Instead, personal guarantees often become the real negotiating tool. Technically they're legal instruments but psychologically they're something else entirely.
An entrepreneur may be perfectly willing to let a special purpose vehicle fail but personal bankruptcy is a completely different proposition.
Sometimes the strongest collateral isn't property. It's the desire to never lose face which perhaps explains the broader evolution taking place across finance.
Banks prefer certainty whereas private capital has always preferred opportunity. As capital searches for new places to deploy, lawyers have expanded the boundaries of what the market considers financeable.
Media rights. Deferred sale proceeds. Satellites.
The economy hasn't simply produced more interesting assets.
It's produced lawyers capable of making those assets liquid.