As a youngster, David F. Freedman ’85 discovered his passion for all-things French.
“I loved everything…the language, the culture,” says the Baker & McKenzie partner. “I even dreamed in French.”
Nearly 20 years later, as an associate at his former firm, Cahill Gordon, he leaped at the opportunity to take a two-year rotation in the firm’s Paris office. It was this move that eventually led to a career as one of the world’s foremost experts on French securities law. A member of the Paris bar, Freedman writes regularly on the subject and also teaches as an adjunct professor at the Institut d'Études Politques (Sciences Po) in Paris, which offers joint programs with Columbia Law School.
“The best way to be a good French securities lawyer is to be a good U.S. securities lawyer,” says Freedman.
Freedman's career in corporate law came about, he says, when he began working with junk bonds. One of Cahill’s clients then was Drexel Burnham Lambert. “I find the work intellectually challenging,” he says. Because French securities law is patterned after its U.S. counterpart, and because he took a number of corporate law courses at the Law School, including corporations and securities with Harvey Goldschmid, Freedman developed a vibrant securities practice.
In Freedman’s current practice, he advises U.S., European, and Middle East companies on capital markets operations, financial services regulations, and mergers and acquisitions transactions. He also advises French companies on water and power projects.
As a Columbia Law School student, however, Freedman’s passion was constitutional law. “I was a Henry Monaghan groupie,” he says. Freedman’s interest in law and First Amendment issues was sparked, in part, by a job as a Miami Herald reporter fresh out of Northwestern University. His turf was the community of Sunrise, Florida, where the mayor and city council were suing each other repeatedly over the terms of the city charter. “My municipal beat turned into a legal beat,” he says.
He’s put in a lot of miles since Sunrise, but business obligations in Paris and New York have not precluded an active pro bono practice, with a focus on constitutional law. With Lambda Legal, he recently worked on a case involving a woman who suffered a fatal brain aneurysm aboard a cruise ship docked in Miami. Her domestic partner and children arrived at a local hospital but were forbidden visitation because regulations allowed visits only by immediate family and spouses. It was only when the dying woman was being given last rites that her partner was allowed to see her. A federal judge is currently deciding whether to allow the case to proceed after the hospital moved to dismiss the lawsuit.
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As a youngster, David F. Freedman ’85 discovered his passion for all-things French.