NABL’s new president sees opportunity
Deanna Gregory said the National Association of Bond Lawyers is at a “pivotal point” in its history, and she plans to use her term as NABL’s president to strengthen NABL’s membership and ensure the organization remains an “indispensable” resource for its members.
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Gregory, a partner at Pacifica Law Group LLP in Seattle, begins her one-year term as NABL president Oct. 14, the first day of NABL’s annual conference, held in Chicago. “The Workshop 2026,” as this year’s event is known, marks the 50th time NABL has held its in-person flagship educational conference.
While recognizing that milestone, Gregory is also looking ahead. Key elements of her strategy to grow NABL’s membership will be continuing to reinforce for members the value NABL brings to their professional lives while also ensuring that firms understand NABL’s value as well, she said in a recent interview with The Bond Buyer.
“We are at a really exciting time in NABL’s history,” Gregory said, adding that “we…at NABL need to continue doing what we’re doing, but we also need to adapt.”
And NABL isn’t alone when it comes to being at a pivotal point, she said. The legal industry as a whole “is at a pivotal point as new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, have changed and will continue to change the way that we work and interact as a community,” said Gregory, who sees an opportunity to reimagine NABL to ensure it continues to be “the most valuable thing that a practitioner can be a part of.”
Through all of that change, NABL will continue to offer “meaningful, timely, substantive content” that helps its members “stay ahead of the issues that they’re facing and their clients are facing,” she said.
“The need that NABL is filling is very different now than it was 20-plus years ago when I joined,” Gregory said, adding that much has changed in the public finance market since she joined NABL in 2002, the same year she graduated summa cum laude from Gonzaga University School of Law.
“The regulatory environment that our clients work in is very different and that we work in is very different,” Gregory said, adding that the volume of work public finance attorneys handle has also changed. “With technology and with meeting client demands, our work has grown and our work has sped up.”
Regulatory scrutiny of the municipal market “both on the tax side as well as on the securities law side in particular” has intensified, she said, adding that “the focus in the enforcement space from the SEC and on disclosure” has put “a magnifying glass” on the muni market in a way that didn’t exist 40, 30 or even, in some cases, 15 years ago.
NABL does “invaluable” work on behalf of members when it comes to regulatory issues, Gregory said, whether that’s leading discussions on key issues or being “at the table” with regulators like SEC and weighing in on things like amendments to or interpretations of rules.
That engagement with regulators enables NABL to relay information concerning regulatory issues in what is often “real time, basically” to its members, who can then provide that information to their clients, she said.
“Again, it’s invaluable,” said Gregory, who also highlighted another aspect of NABL she deems worthy of that adjective: The collegiality.
NABL “has provided an invaluable network of people who are facing the same issues that you’re facing and are trying to figure out the best value, the best legal advice and the best work that we can do for our clients,” she said.
“We’re a very unique organization in that you know we’re all peers and we teach each other,” Gregory said, adding those peers include subject matter experts in certain areas. “And I personally benefited so much from having this broader community across the country on top of all of the substantive value that NABL brings.”
Gregory said she was fortunate at the start of her legal career to work with practitioners who had no hesitation about whether a person in her role should join NABL. Instead, the message communicated was “Oh, you’re joining the bond group. You will become a member of NABL,” she recalled.
“It is what you did,” Gregory said, adding that she’s heard from others who were introduced to NABL in essentially the same way. “I would love to see that again.”
While NABL has and will continue to focus on lawyers, there are many other individuals, including paralegals, “in this community,” she said,
“If you work in the public finance legal community, NABL has a place for you,” Gregory said.
Another big focus for Gregory during her term as president will be continuing NABL’s work to help the “next generation of bond lawyers” be successful in their practices, and underscoring for them “all of the many things that they can gain out of being a part of NABL,” she said.
“This has been a big focus of NABL for many, many years, and we’ve really ramped up this effort in the last couple of years with the development of YLN,” Gregory said.
The Young Lawyers Network, as YLN is more formally known, was established by NABL’s Member Services Committee and is designed to support and bring together attorneys in the early stages of their public finance careers – those with fewer than 10 years of practice.
Gregory has been a member of NABL’s board of directors since 2021, a tenure that has included previous roles as secretary and treasurer. Over the years, she has also served on a variety of NABL committees, including the Education Committee and the General Law and Practice Committee, both of which she previously chaired.
Gregory currently chairs NABL’s Ad Hoc Working Group for the Financial Data Transparency Act. The FDTA “will definitely be, I think, a big focus of NABL this year, considering where we’re at in the timeline of implementation,” she said.
With the first phase now complete, the FDTA rulemaking process has moved into phase two, which involves agency-specific rulemaking by certain federal agencies including the SEC. NABL has had conversations regarding FDTA with the SEC’s Office of Municipal Securities to talk about “their vision and … how we can be helpful,” Gregory said.
“It’s really an exciting time for us because we are at the table with other industry groups and OMS discussing FDTA,” she said, adding that clients of public finance attorneys “are asking questions and they will continue to ask questions throughout this process and then after the decision-making is done.”
Also on NABL’s radar are the midterm elections in November. With those elections “comes an opportunity for more champions of public finance to be elected and to be put in leadership positions” in Congress, Gregory said, adding that NABL’s post-elections role will be to do what it has always done, which is to “offer up our help and serve as a resource to provide insight into the public finance market and tools that are important to state and local governments.”
