Mark Schonfeld, the regional director of the Security and Exchange Commission's (SEC's) New York office, is set to join Gibson Dunn & Crutcher as a partner, reports The American Lawyer.

Schonfeld joined the SEC's Boston office in 1996, before being promoted to the top role in New York in 2004. He will join Gibson Dunn's New York office at the end of September, where he will co-head the firm's securities enforcement practice group.

Randy Mastro, co-chair of the litigation practice and crisis management groups at Gibson Dunn, said: "Mark is a phenomenally talented lawyer with a great national reputation in securities enforcement, and this [move] is richly deserved after such an exceptional career in the public sector."

Mastro acknowledged that several other firms had been competing to recruit Schonfeld.

Over the past decade, Schonfeld has had a hand in AIG's $800m (?450m) securities fraud settlement with the SEC in February 2006, a mutual fund trading practices investigation that netted over $1bn (?565m) in settlements, and a sting on an international insider trading ring that involved Merrill Lynch, Business Week, and a seamstress in a Croatian underwear factory.

Gibson Dunn ranked 20th in this year's Am Law 100 with revenues of $907.5m (?513m) and profits per equity partner of $1.9m (?1.1m).

The news follows the move of former SEC deputy director of enforcement, Walter Ricciardi, to Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison earlier this year.

The American Lawyer is a US sister title of Legal Week.

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