Corp Fin Renee Jones to Leave; Erik Gerding Promoted

Last week, the SEC announced that Corp Fin Director Renee Jones would be leaving the SEC in several weeks and return to her old faculty job at Boston College Law School. Even though Renee served in that role at the SEC for less than two years, she shepherded as many rulemakings as someone would typically do in that job over a span of five years.

Deputy Director Erik Gerding was appointed Director and his background also is one from academia, coming from the University of Colorado Law School when he joined Corp Fin back in October '21.

A couple of trivia points. Renee's tenure is the shortest among the 19 people who have served as Corp Fin Director, as you can tell from this chart I put together a while back. I'm not counting John Coates who had a very short tenure, but was sort of serving in an "Acting" role before becoming the SEC's General Counsel for a short period. [Note that John Coates was only the second person to jump from being Corp Fin Director to serving as the SEC's General Counsel, with Ed Greene being the other luminary.]

And it's been quite some time since someone has been promoted from Deputy Director to Director. John Huber is the only other person to earn that distinction. Several Directors were promoted from other Staffer positions to Director (egs. Linda Quinn; Brian Lane) or left the SEC and returned to serve as Director (egs. David Martin; Meredith Cross) - but oddly enough, a Deputy Director job normally isn't a springboard into the Director job…