Barbara A. Jones

Jones is the co-managing shareholder of Greenberg Traurig’s Los Angeles office and the co-chair of its blockchain and digital assets practice. She specializes in international corporate finance; public and private offerings of equity and debt securities; cross-border mergers and acquisitions; private equity and venture capital; stock exchange listings and compliance; and corporate governance.

A highly competitive master rower, she mulls it all over during 5 a.m. rows on the waters of Marina Del Rey before heading to the office. “It’s dark, and you need lights,” she said. “As the sun comes up you find you have gotten all your stress out, burned a lot of calories and built up your endorphins the first thing in the morning.” She has won medals at the national and international levels.

She is a pioneer as legal counsel in the blockchain and fintech industry. Building on her substantial capital markets and M&A practice, Jones launched Greenberg & Traurig’s blockchain effort in early 2017. She represents many of the businesses creating the technology, including Spring Labs Inc., Global Smart Commodity Group, Ultra Infinity LLC, ORU Market, VeriBlock, RUON Trading Ltd. and Veritable Data Solutions.

Jones devised ways to assure that clients align their platforms’ products and services with the stances of the relevant regulators: not an easy task in an ever-shifting legal landscape, she said.

“Other firms participate in the space, but we have more than 80 lawyers working in an interdisciplinary fashion—our tax specialist in New York, our commodities folks in Chicago, our cybersecurity team. We have great depth across the platform with our lawyers active in Tokyo, Mexico City, Warsaw, London and Berlin. Early on, a lot of groups did not want to launch in the U.S. because our regulations were unclear, so our lawyers offshore were able to aid them there.”

Greenberg Traurig takes a conservative view of innovations such as the ICO [initial coin offering] market for new cryptocurrencies, Jones said. She added that she has high hopes that the new SEC chair, Gary Gensler, will more clearly define the digital asset and token realm. “From a risk management standpoint we have been uncomfortable as a firm because we want to make sure the advice we give is consistent with where the regulators are,” Jones said.

— John Roemer