The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has tapped David Woodcock, a Gibson Dunn lawyer and former agency official, to be its next enforcement director after the regulator’s top cop abruptly quit last month.
Woodcock, a partner with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Dallas, Texas, will join the SEC to lead the more than 1,000-person division beginning May 4, the SEC said in a statement. He will replace Margaret Ryan, who resigned just six months into the job after clashing with the agency’s leaders over the direction of the enforcement program, Reuters previously reported.
Reuters was first to report Woodcock’s appointment.
Woodcock is a longtime securities lawyer who led the SEC’s Fort Worth, Texas, regional office from 2011 to 2015, where he helped create a task force aimed at rooting out accounting and financial reporting misconduct, the SEC said.
Woodcock is well-known to SEC staff both in his work at the SEC and in defending clients in SEC investigations. After leaving the SEC in his previous stint, Woodcock worked at Jones Day and ExxonMobil before joining Gibson Dunn, where he is co-chair of the firm’s securities enforcement practice group, the online profiles show.
