James Garfield Dodrill II

I have been working on corporate and securities transactions since 1988. My wife, Meredith, and I were married in 2000 and I am the proud father of two children (Brooke born in 2001 and Grant born in 2004). I am an active participant in my community, coaching basketball and baseball teams and volunteering in charitable organizations as well as at my children's school. I am a life long athlete and an avid golfer.

I graduated from Brown University in 1988 with a B.A. in Psychology.  Additionally, I took classes in business management. While at Brown, I was a member of the track team and the co-founder and first president of a co-educational fraternity.

From 1988 through 1990 I worked as a corporate legal assistant in the mergers and acquisitions department at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York. While there I assisted on some of the largest M&A transactions ever.

I left Davis Polk after two years and attended the University of Miami School of Law, with my electives focused on corporations, finance and securities. I received my J.D., magna cum laude, in 1993, and was an Articles and Comments Editor of the University of Miami Law Review. I graduated ranked #8 out of 341 in my class and was named a Dean’s Honor Scholar as well as a member of Order of the Coif and Phi Delta Phi legal honor society. I served on the Corporate Law Digest and received American Jurisprudence Awards in Torts, Civil Procedure II and Legal Ethics. Additionally, I authored Interstate Securities Corp. v. Hayes Corp.: Should the Economic Loss Doctrine Apply to Actions Against Fiduciaries?, 47 U. Miami L. Rev. 1193, and co-authored The ABCs of a Leveraged Buyout, 1 . 1.

I started my legal career doing securities and general corporate transactional work in the New York office of Latham & Watkins.  Latham is one of the largest and most prestigious firms in the world. While there, my practice emphasized securities and general corporate law. Representative transactions included public and private offerings of common stock, preferred stock and high yield debt (representing both issuers and underwriters), asset and stock purchase transactions as well as drafting proxy statements, annual reports, 1933 and 1934 Act filings and general corporate contracts.

In 1996 I left Latham and co-founded a company that designs and markets golf equipment, apparel and accessories, serving as President and General Counsel. While serving as such, the company successfully completed multiple rounds of private financing, achieved sales in seventeen states and ultimately consummated an underwritten IPO.

The process of taking my own company public taught me that the experience smaller companies go through in these types of transactions is very different from that of the larger companies I had previously represented – and oftentimes not in a good way. I decided that I wanted to try and change this and subsequent to the IPO, I phased myself out of the company, resigning in early 2000 to start James Dodrill, P.A., a firm focusing on corporate and securities transactional law.

My client base is global, with clients located in approximately a dozen states and a half-dozen countries. In 2008, my firm was ranked as #8 in the United States in rankings of the number of PIPE (private investment in public equities) transactions consummated as investor’s counsel.