Elizabeth Howard Crowell is a Retired Partner of Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP. Ms. Crowell’s thirty-two-year career spanned the corporate securities and corporate finance practice areas with focuses on privately placed investments, public and private securities offerings, bond and commercial loan transactions, debt restructurings and workouts, and domestic and international asset-backed transactions. For over twenty years the primary emphasis of Ms. Crowell’s practice was on structured finance transactions in the debt and equity markets, with a special emphasis on representing corporate trustees, custodians, and portfolio administrators.
Ms. Crowell has a national reputation in the areas of corporate trust, custody, administrative agency, and portfolio administration. She is recognized in The Best Lawyers in America for Structured Finance Law and earned an AV Preeminent Rating in the Martindale-Hubbell Attorney Directory. Ms. Crowell has extensive experience representing corporate trustees in asset securitizations, including collateralized debt obligations, collateralized loan obligations, credit risk and equity-linked derivatives products, debt repackagings, equity index funds, foreign debt securitizations, receivables financings, and trust preferred notes. Ms. Crowell’s clients have included the largest structured finance business unit in the world; she guided the group’s Global Head and related business managers through periods of extraordinary growth and market turmoil.
Representative asset securitization transactions included collateralized debt obligations secured by a portfolio of high yield debt securities and commercial loans; collateralized debt obligations secured by debt securities, bank loans, structured finance obligations and synthetic securities; collateralized loan obligations secured by a portfolio of distressed loans, letters of credit and other securities; and trust preferred notes secured by capital securities issued by subsidiaries of middle market financial institutions. Ms. Crowell regularly handled redemptions, indenture amendment and compliance issues, trustee successorships, exchange offers, consent solicitations, restructurings, and default administration matters.
Ms. Crowell served as a member of Gardere’s Management Committee and Strategic Planning Committee and she previously chaired the firm’s Business Development Committee and Partner Compensation Committee. Ms. Crowell also served as a member of Gardere’s Business Development Committee and Diversity Committee. She received her B.A. in French from Rice University and her J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center, where she served as Articles Research Editor for the Houston Law Review.
In addition to Ms. Crowell’s productive law practice, she has worked tirelessly in the Houston non-profit community.
Ms. Crowell is the past Board President of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. She is a Director and Executive Committee member of Inprint, Inc. and is the current President and a Board member of The Houston Seminar. Ms. Crowell has been an active member of the Rice University Humanities Advisory Board since its inception and is a longstanding member of the Rice University Friends of Fondren Library and the Shepherd Society Governing Council at Rice University. Ms. Crowell is a Sustaining Member of The Junior League of Houston, Inc. and is a Past Director of the United Cerebral Palsy of Texas and the University of Houston Law Alumni Board.