Boston College Law School

Business Advisory Council Membership

profiles

GilliganKathleen M . Gilligan
Partner, Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon LLP

Kathleen Gilligan is a partner in the Business Transactions Department of Wildman Harrold. She has depth and breadth of experience in all areas of acquisition, development, leasing, and disposition of commercial real estate, with an emphasis on representing industrial, corporate, and institutional clients.

Katie has successfully completed numerous complex real estate transactions throughout the country, including recent acquisitions of multi-site industrial property portfolios for a group of off-shore investors totaling over $600 million in a fifteen-month period, and dispositions of industrial properties for a multibillion-dollar UK–based industrial conglomerate. Katie also has extensive experience, at both the national and local levels, in the representation of REITs, shopping center and office building owners, developers, industrial, institutional and office tenants, and real estate investment companies.

Katie has also worked extensively in the areas of commercial real estate lending, and insolvency and debt reorganization. She routinely advises and represents clients in every aspect of real estate matters, from structuring and negotiating complex commercial transactions to drafting and preparing leases and attendant leasing documents, purchase and sale agreements, and financing instruments. Based upon solid reviews and recommendations by clients, senior practitioners, and in-house counsel in the real estate profession, Katie has been selected as a leading adviser and included in the prestigious Legal Media Group's Guide to the World's Leading Real Estate Lawyers.

Practice Areas:
Real Estate
Commercial Leasing 

Representative Experience:
• Represented a leading Australian real estate group and its joint venture partner in the acquisition, within a fifteen-month period, of 76 industrial properties in the greater metropolitan Chicago area, totaling over $600 million. As a result of a recent amendment to the U.S–Australia income tax treaty, which reduced the U.S. tax withholding rate for REIT dividends from 30 percent to 15 percent, the client was motivated to invest in the U.S. real estate market through the use of REITs. This work, which also involved a public offering in Australia, and the use in the United States of a double-REIT structure, was among the first of its kind to be undertaken in the United States.
• Served as local counsel to a New York–based real estate investment company in its $100+ million acquisition of a trophy office building on LaSalle Street in Chicago
• Represents publicly traded, multi-billion dollar UK–based Invensys plc in all aspects of commercial real estate law, including build-to-suit transactions, dispositions, leasing, subleasing, easements and licenses
• Represents a well-known Chicago college in all of its real estate needs, including acquisitions of additional college buildings, leasing of office, commercial and dormitory facilities, and providing counsel for issues arising from the college’s one million square-foot real estate portfolio in the Chicago metropolitan area

Professional Associations:
Member, National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts
Member, Chicago Commercial Real Estate Executive Women
Listed in Guide to the World’s Leading Real Estate Lawyers published by Legal Media Group, 6th Edition (2005)

Bar Admissions:
Illinois, 1990
Maine, 1986 

Education:
Boston College School of Law, J.D., 1986, cum laude

Uniform Commercial Code Reporter Digest, Staff Writer (1984–1985), Associate Editor (1985–1986)
University of Notre Dame, B.A., American Studies, 1983, cum laude



GreenfieldKent Greenfield

Professor of Law, Boston College Law School

Kent Greenfield is Professor of Law and Law Fund Research Scholar at Boston College Law School, where he teaches and writes in the areas of business law and constitutional law. His publications include journal articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, the George Washington Law Review, and the Tulane Law Review, among others. His articles are widely cited, and he has been called “the leading figure” and “the most creative thinker” in the “stakeholder” school of corporate law scholarship. Greenfield has presented papers or lectured in 24 states, in six countries, and at 55 institutions. He is the author of the book “The Failure of Corporate Law,” forthcoming in January 2007 from the University of Chicago Press.

Greenfield was named B.C. Law Teacher of the Year for 2003-04, a recognition bestowed by the Law Students Association on vote of the entire student body. He was also awarded the Emil Slizewski Award for outstanding teaching, given by the graduating class of 2004. Greenfield has been a Law Fund Research Scholar, a recognition of his scholarly contributions, since 2003. He also teaches at Brown University, and has taught at the University of Connecticut School of Law and the University of Hawaii School of Law.

He is the founder and president of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), an association of three dozen law schools and other academic institutions organized to fight for academic freedom and against discrimination. FAIR brought suit against Donald Rumsfeld and others to contest the Solomon Amendment, which forces universities to assist military recruiters. The Supreme Court decided the case against FAIR on March 6, 2006. Greenfield’s work with FAIR was featured in numerous newspapers and media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR.

Greenfield also consults with litigators on issues of corporate accountability. He was instrumental in developing the theory of the case brought against Unocal Corporation for alleged human rights violations committed by the company in Burma.

Before joining the faculty in 1995, Greenfield served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter, of the United States Supreme Court, and to Judge Levin H. Campbell, of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He also worked at the law firm of Covington & Burling, in Washington, D.C.

Greenfield is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, where he graduated with honors and was awarded membership into the honorary society Order of the Coif. He also served as Topics and Comments Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. He received an A.B., with highest honors, from Brown University, where he studied economics and history. Before law school, he traveled extensively in South America and Africa.


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