Crenshaw lands at Venable as SEC shrinks to two

Caroline Crenshaw has joined Venable as counsel on securities issues and regulatory change, WealthManagement.com reports, the latest SEC departure to convert a public objection into a private practice. She was the last Democratic commissioner under the three-seat party cap, and her exit had already left the agency with just three members; with Hester Peirce expected to leave for Regent University School of Law, where the school says she starts in November, the commission will soon shrink to Chair Paul Atkins and Mark Uyeda. Gary Gensler and Jaime Lizárraga had resigned at the start of the administration, making Crenshaw the final Democratic voice in the building before she, too, left.

Her path runs through the agency itself. Crenshaw joined the SEC in 2013 as counsel to Democratic commissioners Kara Stein and Robert J. Jackson, later worked in the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, and was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2020 to succeed Jackson; President Joe Biden’s attempt to give her a second term through 2029 died in the Senate, largely over her skepticism of cryptocurrency policy. Before government, she represented public companies, broker-dealers and investment advisors at Sutherland Asbill and Brennan.

The positions she took there matter more than the resume. She called the agency’s direction “a game of regulatory Jenga,” criticized staff cuts and the decision to stop defending the climate disclosure rule, and objected to Chair Atkins’s move to allow greater private markets exposure in retail investors’ retirement plans. That last objection is the one an RIA should hold onto: private markets are entering mainstream retirement products even as the commission heads toward a two-member roster, and the people reviewing those products now have one less formal check.

Her move turns that dissent into a service. Venable clients get a former commissioner who understands the rulemaking machinery and has made a public case against where it is heading, while RIAs get a clearer map of the legal objections that will accompany the private-markets push. The regulatory version of the alternatives gateway fight will not disappear just because the agency’s Democratic wing has.

With Chair Paul Atkins and Mark Uyeda left, expected rulemaking is likely to be narrow and enforcement selective, and challenges to that agenda now have an unusually well-informed place to start at Venable.