You couldn't change the docs. You still own the risk.

At our Covenant Exchange dinner in Dublin, I found myself saying something that felt faintly heretical after a decade spent advocating for stronger covenant protections: perhaps telling lenders to push harder in primary is not always the most useful answer.

Not because documentation has stopped mattering – quite the opposite, in fact. The question has evolved, however, to this: when you have raised your points, received a handful of concessions and bought the deal, what happens next?

Around the table, the frustrations were familiar: compressed timetables, oversubscribed books, competition for allocations and the recurring suggestion that you are the only investor asking for a particular change. There were also examples of successful pushback, and a reminder that smaller orders can contribute to a collective message. Nobody was proposing that lenders abandon negotiation.

But there is a danger in making primary the entire documentation conversation. If the conclusion is "we couldn't change it," the next step can too easily become "there's nothing we can do."

Thankfully, that's just not true.

Aston Martin, Ardagh and Serta Simmons provided the starting points for a discussion that kept returning to timing. When do investors move beyond recording that a deal has weak documents and actually investigate what the borrower could do with them?

My preference – the earlier the better, and ideally as part of the original underwriting. This doesn't mean assuming that every company will pursue an aggressive liability management exercise (LME), but distinguishing between what is contractually possible and what might make it commercially attractive.

Credit analysts already bring much of the second perspective. They know the business, the sponsor, the liquidity position and the assets. Connecting that knowledge with the contractual flexibility makes the analysis more useful than either discipline operating alone – a point I have been making since FLT's inception.

The practical objection was fair: analysts are already busy. Adding a comprehensive LME exercise to every investment memo is not a small request. The answer then is to establish a repeatable, proportionate process – not another report that nobody has time to read.

Instead, the aim is a working record of the available routes, giving you somewhere to start when circumstances change. A missed forecast, delayed results or an approaching maturity becomes a reason to revisit an existing analysis, rather than begin one from scratch. Ideally, that happens while the debt is still trading near par, not after a sharp fall has narrowed the choices.

The other shift is to start with the assets rather than the terms.

We discussed FLT's Three Buckets Analysis. Put everything the borrower owns into three buckets: your collateral, assets pledged to other creditors but not to you, and unencumbered assets. That last bucket is the borrower's favorite bucket, since it may not need to move something out of your collateral package to finance against it if it was never in the package to begin with. Whether that route is available depends on what the documents say.

This changes the questions you ask. Where is the value? Which assets could another lender want? What actually prevents those assets from being moved or pledged elsewhere?

A blocker checklist doesn't answer all of that. A provision protecting intellectual property may offer little comfort if the asset that really matters is something else. The label is less important than whether the protection fits the business.

This is not only an exercise in deciding when to sell. It's also preparation for the next negotiation.

Some of the most encouraging examples in Dublin involved amend-and-extend transactions where the borrower's need for cooperation had created room for meaningful improvements. That's a different conversation from competing for an allocation in an oversubscribed deal.

But you need to arrive with more than a request for "better docs." You need to know what flexibility matters, why it matters now and which protections would address it. The work done when you have little leverage can become particularly valuable when you get some back.

AI and external covenant reports can help with that work. They should support the investor's understanding, not become a substitute for it.

What I took from Dublin was not a call for perfect documents or perfect foresight. It was a case for keeping documentation inside the investment process after pricing, connecting it to the business and revisiting it as the facts change.

Every day you continue to hold a credit, you make another investment decision. The documents remain part of that decision, regardless of whether you were able to negotiate them.

You couldn't change the docs, but that doesn't mean you've run out of decisions.

Next stop: Amsterdam on October 6th, where we will continue the conversation. Get in touch if you'd like to join us, and visit covenantexchange.org to join the global conversation.

This article reflects themes discussed at the Dublin Covenant Exchange dinner, held under the Chatham House Rule. No comments are attributed to individual participants or firms.