Eileen Heitzler

When crisis comes to the municipal securities market, it’s good to have attorney Eileen Heitzler, a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, in your corner. 

Kent Hiteshew can attest to that. He recommended Heitzler and her Orrick colleagues to the Federal Reserve as bond counsel for the Fed’s unprecedented $500 billion municipal liquidity facility, which helped stabilize a muni market roiled in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Hiteshew, tapped by the Fed in March of 2020 as an emergency hire, knew the Fed needed a lawyer able to quickly integrate the needs of the muni market — with its many thousands of issuers and wide array of credits — into a single financing platform able to meet the unique requirements of the nation’s central bank. 

“With her vast and varied experience, Eileen quickly impressed the in-house lawyers at the Fed and helped design a facility that could both meet the Fed’s statutory requirements while offering state and local issuers a flexible and easily accessible standby financing vehicle,” Hiteshew said in an email. “Given the nature of the crisis, time was of the essence and Eileen was always the beacon in the storm.” 

Indeed, Heitzler’s experience in public finance transactions — gained over more than four decades — has been vast and varied, her bio on Orrick’s website shows. As bond counsel, underwriters’ counsel, borrower’s counsel and credit enhancer’s counsel, she has worked on deals ranging from a few million dollars to more than $1 billion. 

Heitzler considers herself “very lucky” to have had — and continue to have — a career in public finance “because of the people.” 

“There’s a tremendous amount of teamwork, both within an organization and then among all of the working group members,” she said. “And the end result is a project with a public purpose.”

While her practice spans many types of financings, Heitzler’s areas of concentration are financings for not-for-profit organizations, affordable housing, governmental purposes and public power projects. 

“Twenty years ago, when I was a senior managing director at Bear Stearns, I retained Orrick as our underwriter’s counsel for the [New York City] Housing Development Corp. when its multi-family financing program took off during the Bloomberg administration,” Hiteshew said. “Eileen quickly designed and managed a replicable disclosure protocol for the thousands of mortgage loans that secured all [of] HDC’s existing and future series of bonds.” 

Several years later, Heitzler did the same thing for the New York State Housing Finance Agency, he said, adding, her work has helped to finance billions of dollars of affordable rental projects in New York. 

Through her work with the Trust for Cultural Resources of the City of New York, Heitzler has also been involved in transactions for many of New York City’s most iconic cultural institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, American Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden. 

Prior to joining Orrick in 1991, Heitzler worked at the once prominent but now defunct law firm of Webster & Sheffield.
While working there she met Linda Fan, now managing partner at The Yuba Group.

The two have worked on many deals together over the years, Fan said. While “very thorough” regarding transaction details, Heitzler “also doesn’t throw up roadblocks to getting a transaction executed,” Fan said. 

Fan recalled having hired Heitzler as underwriter’s counsel when Morgan Stanley was senior manager on a bond deal for New York University issued through the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York. The bond purchase agreement for the deal had been signed before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she said. 

“And the transaction closed on September 13,” Fan said, adding the closing was “on time and as scheduled” despite the challenges of that time, including the inability of certain parties involved in the deal to get into their Manhattan offices.

“I think we all felt good that it was something that we could come together and accomplish during that period of time, and Eileen was definitely a part of that as were a lot of other people who were involved in the deal,” Fan said.