Emily Johnson

Practice Areas

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, 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 wide range of industries, including energy and infrastructure, sports and media, technology, communications, REITs, healthcare and life sciences, defense, industrials, transportation, and fashion.

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.

Emily 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.