Featured Experts
Featured Experts
Frederick G. Van Zijl
President, RVZ Strategic Advisors;
Former Managing Director, Fortress Investment Group;
Former Head of U.S. Leveraged Finance, Barclays Capital;
Former Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
Rick Van Zijl has more than thirty-five years of experience as a financial services professional. Mr. Van Zijl has held senior roles at leading global investment banks, where he led high-profile transactions. He also served as an investor at a major hedge fund. As an expert witness, he has addressed valuation, access to capital markets, solvency, and leveraged finance, among other issues. His industry experience includes financial institutions, industrials, media, quick service restaurants (QSR), retail, and telecommunications.
Mr. Van Zijl has arranged and invested in customized debt and equity structures to finance buyouts, growth, acquisitions, recapitalizations, and restructurings. He has underwritten scores of debt capital market transactions, and has been involved in all stages of debt issuance, including origination, structuring, and syndication. Mr. Van Zijl has deep experience with leveraged loans, high-yield bonds, bridge financing, and mezzanine and distressed debt. His experience includes leading the debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing for the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and working on such notable restructuring transactions as Xerox and Solectron.
As president of RVZ Strategic Advisors, Mr. Van Zijl consults on topics related to private equity and credit financings in the insurance, lease finance, and asset management industries. Previously, as a managing director at Fortress Investment Group, he evaluated and underwrote investment opportunities in distressed assets, in the specialty finance, media, and infrastructure industries.
Mr. Van Zijl founded and headed the leveraged finance business at Barclays Capital, where he oversaw all noninvestment-grade credit origination and private equity and credit investing in the United States. In that role, he also chaired the firm’s Americas Credit Committee and served on the Americas Investment Banking and Global Investment Committees. Before joining Barclays, Mr. Van Zijl was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, with responsibility for all due diligence, structuring, underwriting, and approval processes for subject transactions in the leveraged finance group.
Featured Experts
Kathryn L. Shaw
Ernest C. Arbuckle Professor of Economics,
Stanford Graduate School of Business;
Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR),
Stanford University
Kathryn Shaw is a nationally recognized expert on labor economics who addresses human resource management, wages, and discrimination issues. She has been retained in high-profile labor matters and has expertise in class certification issues.
Professor Shaw is the incoming president of the Society of Labor Economists, to serve from 2022 through 2025 (first as the President-elect). She is known for having co-developed the research field of “insider econometrics,” which uses internal (or “inside”) company data to analyze how practices such as teamwork and incentive pay affect performance.
In her recent research, Professor Shaw has worked on artificial intelligence (AI) topics, including how the performance of firms improves with uses of AI. She has also analyzed talent management in the software and other knowledge-intensive industries. Her new research papers are focused on different aspects of successful entrepreneurship.
Professor Shaw’s research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. She was associate editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics, and editor of IZA World of Labor. Professor Shaw is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where she coheads the Personnel Economics working group.
Professor Shaw has been honored with multiple awards for excellence in teaching. She teaches courses on personnel economics, people management and organizational strategy, and the impact of AI on productivity.
Before joining the faculty at Stanford, Professor Shaw was the Ford Distinguished Research Chair and Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. She has also held visiting academic appointments at University College London, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the University of Paris.
Earlier in her career, Professor Shaw served as a Senate-confirmed member of the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration, and as visiting economist to the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve.
Featured Experts
Todd T. Milbourn
Hubert C. and Dorothy R. Moog Professor of Finance,
Olin Business School,
Washington University in St. Louis
Todd Milbourn is an expert on valuation, corporate finance, and corporate governance, notably executive compensation and its impact on company stock price, corporate risk-taking, and firm performance. Professor Milbourn has been retained as an expert by private firms, the U.S. Department of Justice, and by individuals in cases related to fair rates of return, breach of contract damages, lost earnings, investment programs, and managerial/executive compensation, including employee stock option programs.
Professor Milbourn has addressed issues related to credit ratings and bank megamergers. He is a coauthor of the executive-level book, The Value Sphere: Secrets of Creating and Retaining Shareholder Wealth, and has published articles in leading scholarly journals, including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Management Science, Journal of Accounting Research, and RAND Journal of Economics.
At Washington University in St. Louis, Professor Milbourn has taught finance-related courses for nearly two decades. An award-winning educator, he has been recognized numerous times for teaching excellence, and his faculty research has twice been honored with the Olin Award: Research That Transforms Business.
Professor Milbourn has experience as a board member of multiple hedge funds and is the current Audit Committee Chair of a hedge fund. He has experience as a board member on multiple special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), including serving as chair of the Audit Committee. Professor Milbourn also speaks extensively at professional and scholarly conferences in Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and across the United States.
Before joining the faculty of Olin Business School, Professor Milbourn taught at the University of Chicago and London Business School.
Featured Experts
Donna L. Hoffman
Professor of Marketing,
Louis Rosenfeld Distinguished Scholar,
GW School of Business,
The George Washington University
Donna Hoffman is a world-renowned expert in online consumer experience and behavior, including how consumers react to information and disclosures in digital and online settings. Professor Hoffman is also a leading scholar on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) on consumer perceptions and behavior. She has extensive experience with survey methods and content analysis.
Professor Hoffman has testified in multiple matters, including in two federal trials. Her testimony in these matters included evaluating and opining on issues relating to online consumer behavior, digital marketing, and the role of internet search in the purchase decision process. Professor Hoffman has also applied her expertise to evaluate allegations of dark patterns in online user interfaces and their influence on user perceptions, decisions, and behavior. Some of her work in these contexts has involved data privacy issues.
Professor Hoffman cofounded and codirects the Center for the Connected Consumer, an academic research center dedicated to understanding consumer experiences with AI and smart devices that are connected to the internet.
Professor Hoffman’s research has appeared in top academic and managerial publications, such as Marketing Science, Management Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. She currently serves on the editorial boards of leading academic publications in the marketing discipline, as well as serving as an associate editor at the Journal of Marketing. She coedited the book Beyond the Basics: Research-Based Rules for Internet Retailing Advantage and has coauthored numerous book chapters focused on consumer behavior in online environments.
One of the most highly cited scholars in the marketing field, Professor Hoffman has received many prestigious research awards. These include the Society for Consumer Psychology Fellow Award; the Robert B. Clarke Educator of the Year Award from Marketing EDGE (formerly the DMEF); the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award for long-term contributions to the marketing discipline; and the William O’Dell/Journal of Marketing Research Award for long-term research impact.
Professor Hoffman has consulted to major corporations on electronic commerce and digital marketing strategy, including FedEx.com, Intel, Lands’ End/Sears, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and Walmart.com. She also served as a member of the Procter & Gamble Digital Advisory Board.
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