WASHINGTON —Jelena McWilliams, who resigned as the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. earlier this year, is joining the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore to help set up an office in Washington.
McWilliams, who will lead the new office, will be joined by Elad Roisman, former commissioner and acting chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Jennifer S. Leete, former associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement as partners, Cravath said. It will be the firm’s third office, joining existing ones in London and New York.
The move comes amid an “increasingly complex and active regulatory environment,” according to the firm.
The D.C. office will advise on financial services and fintech, as well as corporate governance and other regulatory matters, Cravath said. The firm recently represented GreenSky in its acquisition by Goldman Sachs and Afterpay in its acquisition by Square.
Cravath, which often advises on mergers and acquisitions, will likely put McWilliams back in the path of her former colleagues at the FDIC, where a conflict over bank merger policy led to McWilliams’s high-profile and abrupt exit.
Under the leadership of acting Chairman Martin Gruenberg, the FDIC closed its comment period on its overhaul of bank merger policy last week. The Democrat-controlled FDIC board originally voted to issue a request for comment on the agency’s bank merger policy over McWilliams’s objections.
McWilliams has been both a banker and a lawyer; she was previously executive vice president and chief legal officer and corporate secretary for Fifth Third Bank. Before that, she worked in the U.S. Senate, most recently as chief counsel and deputy staff director with the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and as an attorney at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors during the financial crisis.
