03/24/09—The Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Studies, Business & Law Society, and ACS will be co-sponsoring a symposium entitled “Financial Crisis in the Boardroom: How Should Directors Adapt?” on Thursday, April 16 at 6 pm in East Wing 120.  The symposium features a panel of speakers who will discuss how company directors should react to the financial crisis from the point of view of academia, private practice, and the federal government. The speakers are Adam Pritchard, Bart Friedman, Sylvestre Fontes, and Brian Quinn. 

Adam Pritchard is the Frances and George Skestos Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and he specializes in corporate and securities law. He is the co-author of Securities Regulation: Cases and Analysis and Securities Regulation: The Essentials, and his articles have appeared in Business Lawyer, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations. He has clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, served as a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice, worked in private practice, and served as senior counsel in the Office of the General Counsel of the SEC.

Bart Friedman is a partner at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP in New York City. Bart's practice focuses on corporate governance, internal investigations, and other major corporate and securities issues. He has over thirty years of experience advising clients in matters affecting corporate policy and strategy such as directors’ duties and responsibilities and other aspects of corporate governance, including those arising under Sarbanes-Oxley. He is widely regarded for his know-how in connection with accounting disputes and restatements, conflicts of interest, fiduciary responsibilities, liabilities, public disclosures, audits, investigations and enforcement actions. He has both led and served as monitor in numerous international investigations involving complex compliance, ethics and financial control procedural allegations and scenarios. Bart is named among New York's prominent practitioners in Benchmark Litigation: The Definitive Guide to America's Leading Litigation Firms & Attorneys (2009), and is ranked among the top corporate governance lawyers in New York by Chambers USA. Earlier in his career, he was Special Counsel and later Assistant Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sylvestre Fontes is a senior counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Fontes focuses in part on corporate governance issues for the SEC and has been a guest lecturer at the Boston University School of Law.

Brian Quinn is an Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College Law School. Professor Quinn teaches Corporations, Mergers & Acquisitions, and Deals, and his research focuses on corporate law, the structuring of transactions, and private ordering.

Appetizers, dinner and dessert will be served at the symposium. Dinner will start at 6, and the panel will follow at 6:30.