Gregor Baer
Bio:
Gregor Baer is an international corporate and restructuring lawyer whose clients have included companies, financial institutions, universities and other enterprises (from the Global Fortune 100 to private start-ups) in domestic and cross-border transactions, corporate governance, creditors’ rights and reorganization matters. He has special expertise in international strategic partnerships and cross-border restructuring and insolvency. He advises many U.S. and international clients on governance issues with a special focus on privately held companies. He frequently lectures on these topics, has served as a Fulbright Guest Professor of Law at the University of Munich and has co-taught business reorganization at Yale Law School.
Mr. Baer also contributes to international law reform and legal education projects at the invitation of the United Nations, World Bank and International Bar Association (“IBA”). Mr. Baer is the immediate past Co-Chair of the International Bar Association Legal Practice Division’s Insolvency Section. He currently serves on the IBA Insolvency Section Executive Board and as IBA Liaison Officer to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. He serves by invitation on a World Bank Task Force addressing the relationship between global financial stability and harmonization of the world’s secured transactions and insolvency law systems, and has spoken on law reform at the World Bank’s Law, Justice and Development Week. He also co-chairs the World Bank Community of Practice Project on Corporate Governance and Shareholder Rights in Insolvency.
Until 2008, Mr. Baer was a Corporate Partner in the San Francisco office of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, where he was a leader of the Firm’s Europe Practice and helped lead an inter-disciplinary team of lawyers specializing in a wide range of commercial and corporate transactional, creditors’ rights and complex litigation matters. He advised clients on a wide range of corporate transactions and bankruptcy matters, including technology licensing issues arising in reorganization sales and restructuring other contractual relationships with distressed enterprises. He also served as regular outside counsel advising a privately held manufacturing company on legal issues from board governance to operation risk analysis. Mr. Baer structured complex Silicon Valley international joint ventures involving cutting edge intellectual property cross-licensing and cross-border investment/ownership issues (one of which was named Silicon Valley’s Deal of the Month). He also led some of the world’s leading public companies through crisis situations involving corporate governance issues of first impression.
Mr. Baer also advises on Sarbanes-Oxley and other litigation matters. As a member of the Davis Polk & Wardwell (New York) Litigation Department (1986-1993), he was a member of a team advising clients in landmark reorganization cases and litigating a wide range of “bet the company” matters in trial courts and on appeal throughout the United States. He continues advising clients in high-profile class action, toxic tort, environmental and other complex litigation cases.
Mr. Baer was elected to a Fulbright Guest Professorship in Law in Germany, where he lectured nationally on comparative U.S. and German business law to audiences of practicing lawyers and judges during 1995. He also co-taught bankruptcy law at Yale Law School for two years, adjunct to law practice. He was a Rotary Foundation Scholar, and a recipient of the Vice Chancellors of the United Kingdom Graduate Research Fellowship for his doctoral research in comparative constitutional law and politics. In addition to many other publications, he is Contributing Editor of Financing Company Group Restructurings (Baer and O’Flynn, Eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2016).