Holly Smith is a member of Sutherland’s Financial Services Practice Group, where she advises broker-dealers, insurance companies and securities exchanges on the application of the U.S. federal securities laws and the rules of the self-regulatory organizations. She has served as an independent consultant in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (FINRA) enforcement matter involving complex trading systems. 

Holly has developed compliance matrices that benchmark a broker-dealer’s or securities exchange’s compliance with its own policies and procedures as well as applicable SEC and self-regulatory organization (SRO) rules, and has designed and taught supervisory training programs for large registered representative field forces.
 
Before joining the firm, Holly spent 13 years at the SEC, where she served as counsel to Commissioner Mary L. Schapiro for approximately five years and later was appointed an Associate Director in the SEC’s Division of Market Regulation. Her responsibilities as Associate Director included oversight of the U.S. stock exchange, options and over-the-counter markets. She worked extensively on sales practice, compliance and market structure issues, including the development and adoption of rules regarding the handling of customer limit orders and the treatment of quotations entered into electronic communications networks. In addition, she advised the SEC on matters relating to the sale of over-the-counter derivatives.