Finance for Lawyers was designed with the aim of providing the essential dose of skills and knowledge to enhance the financial understanding and confidence of any legal professional working in a commercial setting.

1. Finance for Lawyers
with A4 training
www.A4training.com

2. Finance for Lawyers was designed with the
aim of providing the essential dose of skills
and knowledge to enhance the financial
understanding and confidence of any legal
professional working in a commercial setting.

3. Delegate profile. How we teach.
Finance for Lawyers is best suited to the
needs of legal professionals who use and
interpret information coming from financial
statements or those who practice law within
a financial markets context.
Delegates in the programme typically come
from the following practice areas:
Mergers & Acquisitions, Capital Markets,
Banking and Finance, Real Estate and Tax.
At the same time, due to the broad range of
topics covered, the programme also appeals
to lawyers from other legal disciplines who
want to better uderstand their clients’
business.
Finance for Lawyers is buit on ten years of
experience in delivering financial training
to non-financial managers and business
professionals.
We do not assume anybackground in finance,
and in particular no prior knowledge of
accounting or financial reporting.
We base our courses on real-life examples
and numbers:
• Financial statements of companies,
carefully picked to reflect the industry
focus of delegates.
• Live market data: FX rates, securities
prices and interest rates.
Modular approach.
The programme comprises four one-day
modules, aggregated into two themes:
• Financial Statements
• Investments and Markets
The themes are non-overlapping and
may be delivered independently.
The modules may be further customised
to incorporate specific client requests.
Finance for Lawyers with A4 training

4. Financial
Statements

5. Module 1
Reading and Interpreting
Financial Statements.
Module 2
Analysing Financial
Performance.
• The balance sheet and income statement - understanding how
they react to common business transactions and events - purchases,
sales, acquisitions and disposals of non-current assets.
• Choosing between measurement models:
cost, revaluation and fair value.
• Common creative accounting and profit smoothing techniques.
• Understanding the role of development expenditure and investment
property assets and their impact on performance.
• Why companies create provisions?
• The role of depreciation and amortisation.
• The need for asset write-downs, write-offs and impairment tests.
• Why certain resources and obligations do not appear
on the balance sheet?
• Business acquistions - understanding the computation
of goodwill and other acquistion-specific effects.
• Reporting income in the construction industry - the fallacies
of the stage of completion approach.
• Understanding the difference between net profit,
EBIT and EBITDA.
• Why investors care about ROE, ROA and ROCE?
• Understanding financial leverage in the context of profit
generating potential and capital structure risk.
• Cost generation models and operating leverage.
• Adjusting performance for one-off events and window dressing
- a look at common adjustments applied in master lending
agreements.
• Measuring operating efficiency - inventory, receivables
and payables turnover and their impact on liquidity.
• Why cash flows matter more than profit - making sense
of the cash flow statement.
• Assessing ability to pay off debt - interest coverage
and free cash flow.
• Understanding the rationale behind common approaches
to business valuation.
Finance for Lawyers with A4 training

6. Investments
and Markets

7. Finance for Lawyers with A4 training
• Understanding time value of money.
• Overview of rates of return on risk-free investments.
Making sense of negative interest rates.
• Setting market rates of interest - LIBOR, EURIBOR determination.
• How businesses measure the profitability and rates of return on
investment projects? Net present value (NPV) and the internal
rate of return (IRR).
• Understanding the cost of capital.
• Determining the rate of return (yield) on investments in fixed
income and equity securities.
• Understanding bond price sensitivities (maturity and coupon
effects).
• Assessing cross-border investments in a multi-currency setting -
introduction to FX rate analysis.
• The drivers of the USD/EUR and other common currency pairs.
• Classifying derivatives - contract types and trading methods.
• Forward contracts explained - commodity, FX and interest r
ate underlyings.
• Demystifying FX forward rates - making the link between
exchange and interest rates.
• Futures trading - common examples from major markets.
• The role of the clearinghouse and margin systems.
• Call and put option payoffs and applications.
• Pricing options and warrants - the intuitive approach.
• Understanding convertible and reverse convertible bond
structures.
• Common option hedging strategies and what happens when
they go wrong.
• Making sense of swaps - IRS, CIRS and equity swaps.
• Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) explained.
Module 3
Appraising Investments.
Module 4
Derivatives.

8. For the past four years we have been
successfully designing and delivering
customised training programmes for law
firms and in-house legal teams on all
aspects of finance and financial reporting.

9. Who we are.
A4 Training is led by Wojtek Lyjak, an accomplished financial tutor
and expert in financial training.
Wojtek combines practical industry insights with an aptitude
and passion for teaching, making his courses a uniquely intensive,
thought-provoking and rewarding experience.
Over the past decade he has delivered over one thousand training
days to several thousand clients from all walks of business life. His
training experiences have ranged from speaking to several hundred
delegates at a time to highly personalised one-to-one workshops.
Wojtek’s previous roles include managerial responsibility for financial
training at the EY Academy of Business, a company he continues
to cooperate with in selected geographical markets, as well as
accounting policy functions at a multinational financial institution.
Wojtek is a CFA charterholder and fellow member of the
Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA).
Finance for Lawyers with A4 training
What we do.
A4 Training is a specialist provider of financial education
formed out of the belief that excellent analytical training
should be accurate in addressing development needs,
accessible to clients with a variety of preferred learning styles
and affordable by offering an exceptional price-to-quality ratio.
We design bespoke training solutions to support financial
analysts, investment and credit professionals and all non-
accountants in their efforts to make sense of the complex
world of financial reporting.
Our clients include commercial and central banks, financial
supervision authorities, investment funds and brokerage houses
as well as numerous blue-chip non-financial institutions.

10. Get in touch.
www.a4training.com
contact@a4training.com
(+48) 22 100 44 50