Profile: Randall D Guynn

Banking

Biography: Banking

Mr Guynn is head of Davis Polk & Wardwell's financial institutions group. His practice focuses on providing strategic bank regulatory and enforcement advice and advising on M&A and capital markets transactions when the target or issuer is a banking organisation or other financial institution. He also advises on corporate governance and internal controls, cross-border collateral transactions, securities settlement systems and payment systems.

Mr Guynn joined Davis Polk in 1986 and became a partner in 1993. He practised in the Paris office from 1988 to 1990 and the London office from 1994 to 1999.

He was legal adviser to the Working Group on Public Disclosure (an advisory group to the Federal Reserve that issued recommendations for improving public disclosure by financial institutions in 2001), a member of the drafting committee for the Hague Convention (PRIMA) on Private International Law (which established modernised choice of law rules for cross-border securities and collateral transactions) in 2002, and chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on Modernizing Securities Ownership, Transfer and Pledging Laws of the Capital Markets Forum of the International Bar Association from 1994 to 2000.

Mr Guynn graduated, with highest honours, from Brigham Young University in 1981 and in 1984 received his JD, Order of the Coif, from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Law Review. He was a law clerk for the Honorable William H Rehnquist, US Supreme Court, from 1985 to 1986, following a clerkship with the Honorable J Clifford Wallace, US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, from 1984 to 1985.

He has been a speaker on numerous banking and securities law panels and is the author of several publications, including "US Law Considerations Applicable to Foreign Bank Acquisitions of US Banking Institutions", in Regulation of Foreign Banks: United States and International, 2000 (3rd ed); "United States Disclosure Standards for Banks", in AsiaLaw Week (1998); and "Modernizing Securities Ownership, Transfer and Pledging Laws: A Discussion Paper on the Need for International Harmonization" (Capital Markets Forum, International Bar Association 1996).