JAMES HANKS JR.

Venable LLP

James “Jim” Hanks Jr. is widely regarded as one of Maryland’s leading corporate lawyers. As senior counsel at Venable LLP, Hanks advises clients on Maryland corporation law, regularly serves as independent counsel to boards of directors and board committees of real estate investment trusts and other major U.S. corporations, and appears as an expert witness in significant transactions, stockholder litigation, conflicts of interest and corporate governance matters. He also advises governments on revision of their corporate and securities laws.

Hanks earned his bachelor of arts from Princeton University, his bachelor of laws from the University of Maryland Law School — where he served as an editor of the Maryland Law Review — and his master of laws from Harvard Law School. Following his LL.B., he served as law clerk to Judge Charles Fahy of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He holds an appointment as distinguished visiting professor from Practice at the University of Maryland School of Law.

For more than 20 years, Hanks served as a visiting senior lecturer of management at the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and as an adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, teaching securities regulation, mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance. For more than 15 years, he was a senior lecturer at Northwestern Law School, where he taught mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance. He has also taught corporation law at law and business schools in the Republic of Georgia, Guatemala, the Republic of South Africa and Zambia, and at the Institute of Law in Beijing. From 1996 through 2014, he taught U.S. and European corporate law and governance at the Cornell Law School–Université de Paris 1 Sorbonne Summer Institute in Paris, and from 2006 through 2015 in the Northwestern Law School–Instituto de Empresa Executive LL.M. program in Madrid. During fall 2003, he served as Commerzbank Visiting Professor of Law at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg and has taught there several times since.

An elected member of the American Bar Association’s Section of Business Law Committee on Corporate Laws — where he previously served from 1984 to 1990 and from 1996 to 2002 — Hanks has been actively involved for more than 30 years in revising the Model Business Corporation Act, the Maryland General Corporation Law and the Maryland REIT Law. He is the author of Maryland Corporation Law, the only current treatise covering all aspects of Maryland corporation law and practice, and co-author with former Stanford Law School Dean Bayless Manning of Legal Capital, 3rd and 4th editions. He has also served as a drafter of the Corporate Director’s Guidebook, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 7th editions, and the Fund Director’s Guidebook, all editions, and is editor of the current and prior two editions of the Handbook for the Conduct of Shareholders’ Meetings.

“In addition to practicing law, I’ve taught law and corporate governance not only in the United States but internationally — in places like Paris, Madrid, Beijing, South Africa, Guatemala and Zambia — expanding my perspective and bringing diverse legal insights back to my work,” Hanks said.