Partner
Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP
Steven Lofchie, a partner in the Financial Services Group, concentrates his practice in advising financial institutions on regulatory issues and on derivatives and other financial instruments. He is consistently recognized in the United States by Chambers USA, Legal 500, and IFLR 1000 in the areas of financial services regulation and derivatives. The Best Lawyers in America also selected Steven as one of the nation's leading lawyers in several areas including: Administrative/Regulatory, Derivatives and Futures, Securities/Capital Markets, and Securities Regulation Law. He is the author of Lofchie’s Guide to Broker-Dealer Regulation (4th ed. 2011), considered the leading treatise in the field. In 2014, he testified before a subcommittee of the House on equity market structure.
Steven counsels funds (private and both SEC and CFTC-registered), broker-dealers, and banks regarding regulatory and transactional issues. His regulatory practice addresses virtually all the securities-law related statutory and regulatory requirements applicable to these institutions and their affiliates.
Steven represents many financial entities and their investment advisers on trading.
His transactional practice focuses on over-the-counter derivatives, securities financing, and trading agreements (from prime brokerage to the use of asset-backed structures for the financing of investments in hedge funds), and various types of licensing and membership agreements.
Steven is a frequent writer and speaker on financial regulation and policy. In 2014, he testified before a subcommittee of the House on equity market structure. In addition, he has been very active in developing web-based compliance tools, online compliance manuals, research tools and document analysis systems. These tools are available through www.findknowdo.com.
Regulatory Intelligence includes:
-
Numerous books, calendars, finding guides and other tools.
Regulatory Intelligence also hosts tens of thousands of other documents, including statutes, rules, no-action letters, releases, case law and relevant legislation.
Steven received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and has an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School, where he was a General Motors Fellow. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a member of the Yale Law Journal.
He also serves as a Senior Fellow on financial regulation at the Center for Financial Stability, a nonpartisan financial industry think tank.
Practice Areas
- Bank Regulation
- Broker-Dealer Regulation
- Commodities & Futures Regulation
- Derivatives & Structured Products
- Financial Regulation
- Investment Management
- Investment Management Litigation
- Investment Management Regulation & Compliance
- Investment Management Transactions
- OTC Derivatives
- Structured Products
- Swap Regulation
Admissions
- U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York
- New York
Education
- Yale Law School J.D., 1989
- Columbia Business School M.B.A., 1984
- Sarah Lawrence College B.A., 1979
Recent Articles & Comments
The question of how digital assets held in custody should be treated for accounting purposes must begin with how the obligation to return the digital assets should be treated in the bankruptcy of the custodian. If the "owners" of the digital assets have a right to their return and the digital assets are not available to other creditors of the bankrupt custodian, then the presumption is that the digital assets should not go on the custodian's balance sheet. Conversely, if the digital assets…
The cost of dealing with any rule change increases in a more than straight-line basis as new rules are added. For example, a firm may have technology staffing to deal with one rule change at a time, but if there are two or five rule changes simultaneously, then the firm must hire more staff at the same time that other firms are trying to hire additional staffing.
This, of course, assumes that the costs of any one rule change are readily quantifiable and can be managed. The costs of…
At a time when the U.S. debt is soaring and the costs of financing that debt are rising faster because of inflationary pressures, it is surprising that the SEC would implement rules that so many market participants, on both buy-side and sell-side, believe will increase the costs of participating in the market for U.S. government debt and will discourage participation. One would think that the SEC would not proceed with a rule impacting the market for U.S. government securities in the absence…
The Senators presume that financial institutions will lose a lot of money in a "high quality" climate crisis scenario. In a recent speech, the Vice Chair of the FDIC stated, "In the U.S., there is no record of banks ever failing because of climate-related events, and it has been extremely rare for banks to even suffer meaningful losses." The Vice Chair went on to say that climate "risk is much lower than many other risks that have gotten much less attention over the past couple years,…