Thomas A. Russo

Thomas A. Russo served as executive vice president and general counsel, with responsibility for legal, compliance, regulatory affairs, and government affairs, at American International Group, Inc. from February 2010 to November 2016.

Mr. Russo is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.

Prior to joining AIG, Mr. Russo served as senior counsel in the New York office of Patton Boggs. Mr. Russo was chief legal officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings from January 1993 to December 2008. Before joining Lehman Brothers, Mr. Russo was a senior partner and member of the management committee at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. He also served as an advisor to the Brady Commission and as deputy general counsel of the CFTC and later the first director of the CFTC’s Division of Trading and Markets.

A thought leader on financial market issues, Mr. Russo has testified before Congress on numerous occasions and participated at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for over ten years. He has also written more than 70 articles on topics in the commodities, securities and banking fields relating to financial market regulation. Mr. Russo co-authored the federal securities law treatise “Regulation of Brokers, Dealers and Securities Markets,” published by Warren, Gorham & Lamont. He also authored “Regulation of the Commodities Futures and Options Markets,” a two-volume treatise on federal commodities laws published by Shepard’s/McGraw-Hill. In 2011 the Group of Thirty published an analysis of the implications of the 2008 financial crisis on the current economy co-written by Mr. Russo, titled “The 2008 Financial Crisis and its Aftermath: Addressing the Next Debt Challenge.”