Scott Stengel has joined King & Spalding as a partner from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, while a former colleague, Howard Goldwasser, also recently moved to a new firm.

Stengel is a member of the steering committee of the US Covered Bond Council, which operates under the auspices of the Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (Sifma). He testified on covered bonds at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee in September and the House Financial Services Committee in December 2009, and is due to be a witness at a hearing of a subcommittee of the HFSC next week.

“This was a compelling opportunity to join a first class global law firm, where I can draw on an extraordinarily deep bench of capital markets and regulatory lawyers to grow the covered bond and the general banking practices,” Stengel told The Covered Bond Report.

“King & Spalding is widely recognized as a global leader in both finance and real estate, and our expertise there will be critical to clients as we move forward on covered bonds as well as GSE reform in the US.”

Stengel worked at Orrick from 1997 until last month.

Goldwasser, who worked with Stengel for many years at Orrick before joining Allen & Overy in 2006, joined K&L Gates last month. He arrived at K&L Gates from Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, which he had joined after leaving A&O in September 2009.

“To me, one of the big draws at K&L Gates is that the firm has one of the market-leading housing finance practices in the US and can offer a level of expertise in that space that will position us well when the covered bond market starts up in the US,” said Goldwasser. “And it also has a very international footprint.”

Goldwasser has been a member of the US Covered Bond Council and the American Securitization Forum’s covered bond sub-forum. At A&O, he worked on the first US covered bond programmes and some of the early Canadian programmes.