SEC Hires Expert in Securities Law

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday named Andrew Vollmer, a securities lawyer who has represented corporate clients in SEC investigations and proceedings, as its deputy general counsel.

Vollmer, 52, is a partner in the Washington office of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr. The law firm has recently hired former senior SEC officials, including onetime enforcement chiefs Stephen Cutler and William McLucas.

“He brings a keen intellect and broad and deep experience to the task of investor protection,” SEC General Counsel Brian Cartwright said in a statement.

Vollmer represented former Xerox Corp. Chief Executive Paul Allaire and Chief Financial Officer Barry Romeril in an SEC case in 2003. They and four other former executives agreed to pay $22 million to settle allegations that they participated in an accounting fraud that led Xerox to overstate profit by $1.4 billion from 1997 through 2000.

The SEC brought the case against the six after settling a separate case with Xerox in 2002. Xerox and the executives neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s allegations.

Vollmer has frequently spoken and written on securities law, and he co-wrote a 2004 study on internal corporate investigations.

He succeeds Meyer Eisenberg, who retired in January, and will start his new job at the end of the month.

Also Monday, it was announced that Alan Beller, the former SEC official who led the rule-making effort to implement the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, will return this summer to private practice at law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.

Beller, 56, left his post as director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance in February. SEC Chairman Christopher Cox named John White, a former partner at New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, to replace Beller.