Law

Assistant Professor of Law
Director of the Small Business & Nonprofit Law Clinic
Co-Director of the Transactional Law Practice Center

"After thirty years of practice as a lawyer, I'm thrilled to be here sharing with our students some of the skills I've acquired over the years - none of this was taught when I went to law school, and it's something all practicing lawyers now expect in new lawyers. As a newcomer to Chase, I'm impressed with the collegiality and caliber of the faculty and the energy of the students. My students really want to learn, and it's a pleasure working with them."

Profile

Professor Barbara Wagner is the Director of the Chase Small Business and NonProfit Law Clinic and Co-Director of the Transactional Law Practice Center. Before joining Chase, Prof. Wagner practiced law for over 30 years, including 10 years in private practice and over 20 years as an inhouse lawyer with Chiquita Brands International, Inc., most recently as Vice President, Associate General Counsel and Assistant Secretary. The number two lawyer in the department, her responsibilities included the company's SEC compliance and other corporate, finance and corporate governance areas, as well as significant transactional work. She also served as the company's Chief Compliance Officer from 2005-2007. Before moving inhouse, she worked at law firms in New York City (including Shearman & Sterling and Skadden, Arps, Slate Meagher & Flom) and Cincinnati (Frost Brown Todd), where she was involved in a variety of corporate and securities law and transactional areas, as well as structured finance.

Professor Wagner's prior teaching experience includes several semesters as an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, where she taught hands-on corporate practice courses involving corporate transactional practice, drafting and negotiation. Prior to attending law school, she also taught a corporate finance course at the University of Maryland.

Professor Wagner has been active, including as a speaker, in several bar associations, most notably serving for four years as the chair of the Value Challenge Committee for the Association of Corporate Counsel Southwest Ohio Chapter which organized several programs for practitioners, most recently Partnering Among Inhouse Counsel, Outside Counsel and Law Schools to Improve Training for Law Students and Lawyers (February 2012). She has participated in drafting comment letters to the SEC on various proposed regulations through law firm submissions and submissions from the Federal Securities Law Subcommittee of the ABA Business Law Committee. She is admitted to practice in New York and Ohio and is a member of the American, Ohio and Cincinnati Bar Associations.

She serves on the board of directors of Dining for Women, a nonprofit organization committed to changing the world one dinner at a time (www.diningforwomen.org), is a national council member of YaleWomen (a women's alumni organization), an advisory board member of both YaleGALE (Yale Global Alumni Leadership Exchange) and the Institute for the Global Practice of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and is a trustee of the Locust Hill Road Association. She has served for over twenty years as the director of the Yale alumni schools committee for southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky.