Corporate and Transactional Practice

Clint Bergstrom

Counsel

Mayer Brown

Clint Bergstrom is counsel in the New York office of Mayer Brown's Banking & Finance practice. He concentrates his practice on United States and cross-border financial transactions. He acts for a public and private issuers and sponsors and his experience includes asset sales, lending transactions and structured finance transactions for a wide range of asset types, including whole business securitizations, first-lien residential mortgages, shipping containers and agricultural loans.

Clint mentors law students through the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity and is a former member of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on Asian Affairs.  Prior to law school, Clint worked in sales and management at a Taiwanese security printer in Taipei, Taiwan and at a joint-venture in Xiamen, China for a total of three years. 

Andrew Bettwy

Partner

Proskauer

Andrew Bettwy is the co-chair of the Corporate Department and co-head of the Finance Group.

Andrew’s principal focus is the representation of public and privately held companies, financial institutions, and private equity sponsors in leveraged finance and other financing transactions. Andrew represents both lenders and borrowers in a wide range of transactions involving multiple industries and diverse debt capital structures, including acquisition financings, recapitalizations, multiple lien and subordinated debt financings, debtor-in-possession and exit financings, and private placements.

His notable clients include Church & Dwight, Discovery Communications, Bed Bath & Beyond, and TSG Entertainment. Andrew also has represented several leading financial institutions while at Proskauer, including Ares Commercial Finance, Bank of America, Citibank, CoBank, Credit Suisse, and Jefferies Finance.

Karessa Cain '04

Corporate Partner

Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz

Karessa Cain is a partner in Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz’s Corporate Department, where she focuses on mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, and corporate and securities matters. She has worked on a wide range of transactions, including domestic and cross-border acquisitions, private equity transactions, spin-offs, takeover defense, shareholder activism and proxy contests, joint ventures and capital markets transactions.

Karessa was selected Dealmaker of the Year by The American Lawyer  (2020), and was recognized as one of The Deal’s Top Women in Dealmaking 2022 and as a leading Corporate/M&A Lawyer by Chambers, among other legal and M&A honors.

Karessa teaches a seminar on public company M&A at Columbia Law School, and frequently writes and speaks about M&A, corporate governance and other legal issues.  Her writings have been published in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, Columbia Law School’s Blog on Corporations and the Capital Markets, Bank and Corporate Governance Law Reporter, the Securities Reform Act Litigation Reporter and other publications.  She also served as a consulting editor for the NYSE: Corporate Governance Guide.

Karessa received her B.A. cum laude from Yale College in 2000.  She received her J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2004, where she was a James Kent Scholar and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.  Following graduation from law school, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

She is a Fellow of the American College of Governance Counsel and the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the New York and American Bar Associations.  She serves on the Corporation Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association.

Karessa is a member of the Board of Trustees of Prep for Prep, a non-profit organization that prepares promising students of color in New York City for success at independent schools, and she was a Fellow in the Partnership for New York City’s David Rockefeller Fellows program.

Jill Guzzetti

Investment Management Special Counsel

Schulte Roth & Zabel

Jill M. Guzzetti focuses her practice on corporate and securities matters for investment managers and private investment funds. She represents institutional and entrepreneurial investment managers of a wide range of hedge, private equity, credit, and real estate funds regarding the structure of their businesses and day-to-day operational, securities, corporate and compliance issues. She advises clients on structuring and negotiating seed and strategic investments, co-investments and joint ventures, as well as scalable platforms. Jill also represents institutional investors evaluating and negotiating investments in alternative investment funds.

Jill received her B.S., magna cum laude, from the Ohio State University and a J.D. from Boston College Law School.

David Kurzweil

Partner

Latham & Watkins

David Kurzweil, former Local Co-Chair of Latham & Watkins' Corporate Department, advises leading US and international private equity funds and companies on a range of complex M&A and joint venture transactions.

Mr. Kurzweil’s multifaceted practice includes public and private company deals on behalf of a variety of principals, special committees, private equity and leveraged buyout funds, and financial advisors. He draws on his prior experience working in the London office of a global law firm to regularly advise both domestic and international entities in multijurisdictional transactions. His deal work covers diverse industries, with a particular focus on the energy, infrastructure, and financial services sectors.

Mr. Kurzweil also provides general corporate advice to both public and private companies.

A nationally recognized M&A practitioner, Mr. Kurzweil has been regularly featured in Chambers USA and The Legal 500 US for his prominent transactional work.

Mr. Kurzweil serves on the Board of Directors of StreetWise Partners, a nonprofit organization that works with low-income individuals to overcome employment barriers, obtain better jobs, and achieve economic self-sufficiency by creating deep mentoring relationships with volunteer business professionals. He is also on the Board of Visitors of Columbia Law School, a group of distinguished alumni who represent the diversity of experiences, interests, and places embraced by Columbia Law School.

Mr. Kurzweil previously served as Co-Chair of the firm’s New York Corporate Department.

Eric Talley

Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law

Columbia Law School

Eric Talley is an expert on the intersection of corporate law, governance, and finance. He additionally teaches and conducts research in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, quantitative methods, machine learning, contract and commercial law, alternative investments, game theory, and economic analysis of law. 

As a co-director of the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership, Talley directs research and programs focused on the future of corporate governance and performance. He also hosts the Columbia-based podcast, Beyond “Unprecedented”: The Post Pandemic Economy. Talley is a two-time recipient of the Law School’s Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2017 and 2022).

Before joining Columbia in 2015, Talley held tenured faculty appointments at the University of California, Berkeley (2006-15) and the University of Southern California (1995-2006). He has also held visiting appointments at Caltech, Pardee-RAND Graduate School, University of Chicago, Harvard University, Georgetown University, and Stanford University.