John Hamilton, a private funds attorney and new member of the Fiduciary Governance Group, is heading to New York University Law School tomorrow, where he will serve as a panelist at the 2019 Conference on Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing, co-organized by the Impact Investing Legal Working Group (IILWG) and the Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship. John is participating on the panel titled “New Approaches to Aggregating Capital into the Impact Investing Space.” The panel is described as follows:
As the impact investing market continues to scale at the intersection of philanthropy and traditional finance, both non-profit and for-profit organizations are utilizing new legal structures to channel additional capital toward their missions. The larger trend is driven in part by investors seeking to align their portfolios with their values. Attorneys who practice in this area will learn about necessary legal and regulatory considerations related to implementing innovations to channel such demand. Specifically, lawyers will explore the legal challenges to maintaining exemptions for non-profit organizations and partners while working with impact shares. This panel will also discuss legal approaches to the significant regulation affecting investment products aimed at a broader audience of retail and community investors, as well as the less heavy regulation of institutional products targeting a narrower audience of more sophisticated investors. The discussion will be enriched with examples, including a non-profit ETF sponsor that partners with underlying non-profit organizations, as well as cases of direct public offerings of equity and debt securities by private companies and non-profit organizations.