Andrew M. Kaufman ’74, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School and formerly a senior transactional partner and now “of counsel” in the Chicago office of Kirkland & Ellis, has been appointed executive director of the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law.
The Lowell Milken Institute was established in 2011 by a $10 million gift from Lowell Milken ’73, a leading philanthropist and pioneer in education reform.
Kaufman is the founder and former head of Kirkland & Ellis’ debt finance group. He earned his bachelor’s degree cum laude from Yale University in 1971 before earning his law degree from Vanderbilt, where he was editor-in-chief of the Vanderbilt Law Review and was elected to Order of the Coif.
He is presently a member of the TriBar Opinion Committee, a well-respected non-partisan panel addressing legal opinions in transactional practice, and serves as program chair for the national Working Group on Legal Opinions. He is also a member of the Uniform Commercial Code Committee, the Commercial Financial Services Committee, the Legal Opinions Committee and the Audit Responses Committee for the American Bar Association Section of Business Law.
Kaufman lectures and writes frequently on financing, commercial law and legal-opinion issues at national professional seminars and programs and in related publications. Since 2009, he has been a professor of the practice of law in the law and business program at Vanderbilt Law School, teaching courses on secured transactions, transactional practice, leveraged buyouts and syndicated loan transactions in commercial lending. At Vanderbilt, he also serves on the dean’s board of advisors.
