A former general counsel for the Department of Housing and Urban Development has joined Alston & Bird in Washington, the firm announced Wednesday.
Keith Gottfried, most recently a partner at Blank Rome, joins Alston’s corporate transactions and securities group. He focuses his practice on mergers and acquisitions transactions, shareholder activism, contested control transactions, corporate governance, SEC reporting issues and NYSE and NASDAQ compliance, among others.
In 2000, Gottfried left Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom to be the general counsel and chief legal officer for Borland Software Corporation in Silicon Valley. In 2005, he was nominated and confirmed as the general counsel for HUD.
In an interview, Gottfried said that serving the country at that post was the greatest honor he has had. “When I got to HUD, I started looking at how we could push more regulatory transparency,” he said.
In the past Gottfried has represented private and public companies in M&A transactions, cash and stock-for-stock mergers, tender offers, exchange offers, cross-border transactions, special committee representations and takeover defense assignments.
Gottfried said that in the past five years he has done a lot of work surrounding shareholder activism, both for dissident shareholders and the companies themselves.
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