Bill Brandt is the Executive Chairman of Development Specialists, Inc. Better known in the industry as “DSI”, the company has offices in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, among other cities, and is one of the country’s oldest and most prominent corporate restructuring and advisory firms. During his career over the last 45 years, Mr. Brandt has been involved in thousands of restructuring, workout, bankruptcy and insolvency matters in the United States and abroad, including frequently serving as a Receiver in both federal and state courts, Chapter 11 Trustee, Chapter 7 Trustee and Examiner under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, as well as Assignee for the Benefit of Creditors in numerous jurisdictions. He and his firm continue to be involved in some of the most celebrated and complex restructuring and insolvency matters in the arenas of both business and governmental reorganization.

Mr. Brandt has advised Congress on matters of bankruptcy and insolvency policy, and as a part of these efforts has been the principal author of a number of amendments to the Bankruptcy Code, including the provision which permits the election of Trustees in Chapter 11 cases. In addition, he served as a member of the Commission empanelled by the American Bankruptcy Institute to address the larger reform of Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code and the nation’s corporate restructuring regime.

Active in both civic and political endeavors, Mr. Brandt currently chairs the National Advisory Council for the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of The Honorable Tina Brozman Foundation for Ovarian Cancer Research (Tina’s Wish). He is also part of the ownership group that recently completed the purchase of Chicago’s second-largest daily newspaper, The Chicago Sun-Times. Mr. Brandt served as a Delegate to both the 1996 and 2008 Democratic National Conventions and was a member of the Democratic Party’s National Platform Committee for the 2000 convention. In 2016, he was a member of the United States Electoral College for the 2016 Presidential Election, serving as an Elector from the State of Illinois.

During the latter portion of the 1990s, in response to an invitation from business and political leaders in the People’s Republic of China, Mr. Brandt worked with various public policy, law and banking leaders in that country on approaches to the reorganization and restructuring of some of China’s state-owned industries. In 2002 he served on the State of California’s Business Delegation dispatched to Cuba to discuss politics, business and trade. In 2015, he completed his third two-year term, pursuant to gubernatorial appointment and State Senate confirmation, as the Chair of the Illinois Finance Authority, one of the nation’s largest state-sponsored bond issuing agencies.

He has written for a number of publications spanning a broad spectrum of thought, ranging from Maclean’s, Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine, to Corporate Board Member and Urban Land; is a frequent commentator on topics of corporate restructuring, bankruptcy policy and municipal insolvency; and regularly appears on a host of both cable and broadcast outlets.