Norm Champ is a partner with Kirkland & Ellis. He joined the law firm in 2016 from the SEC, where he had been Director of the Division of Investment Management. Prior to heading Investment Management, Mr. Champ served as Deputy Director of OCIE (Office of Compliance, Inspections and Examinations) and Associate Regional Director for Examinations in the SEC’s New York Office, [See fuller bio on NormChamp.com]  

And Mr. Champ is the author of Going Public: My Adventures Inside the SEC and How to Prevent the Next Devastating Crisis – a chronicle of his 5 years at the SEC and how they shed light on the regulatory process and government policy-making.

Upon joining the SEC in 2010, Mr. Champ observed that the agency “wasn’t a typically dysfunctional bureaucracy” that had broken parts in need of fixing. Instead, “there were parts of it that had never been built.” He explains by elaborating on the  Ponzi schemes perpetrated by Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford. How, for example, could both schemes have lasted as long as they did without being detected by SEC examiners? Mr. Camp attributes that, in part, to the Commission’s failure to cultivate examiner expertise and encourage follow-through. The SEC was a divided operation, where examiners worked separate and apart from enforcement, and where the culture rewarded passivity and fostered petty disfunction.

Gerald Russello, a former SEC supervisor and currently a Sidley Austin law partner, provides a book review in the WSJournal.