LATEST PANEL: Digital Assets: The Next Phase of Integration

Morrison Warren is a partner and the co-chair of Chapman’s Investment Management Practice Group. Morrison focuses his law practice in the corporate and securities area with an emphasis on investment companies, including open-end funds, closed-end funds, exchange-traded funds, unit investment trusts, and private investment companies. He also represents broker-dealers, investment advisers, and municipal securities dealers, as well as publicly held companies with respect to their compliance with stock exchange requirements and federal securities laws.

Morrison is one of the leading legal ETF practitioners and now serves as fund counsel to over 600 ETFs with over $330 billion in assets under management. Through his representation of these clients, he has helped bring to market some of the most notable products in recent years, including the first 1940 Act commodity ETF, the first blockchain ETF, the first “defined outcome” ETFs, the first levered and inverse single-stock ETFs, three of the first spot bitcoin ETFs, and two of the first spot ether ETFs. He was also the co-author of the first non-Vanguard “dual share class” exemptive relief application seeking to add ETF share classes to mutual funds.

Morrison has been at the forefront of the rapidly evolving blockchain and digital asset landscape, actively engaging in advocacy initiatives and policy discussions with lawmakers and regulators to promote the responsible development of digital asset products and is a thought leader as it relates to the impact of tokenization on investment products and the instruments they hold. He represents clients seeking to offer ETFs backed by a variety of digital assets and the facilitation of staking by such ETFs. He also represents 1940 Act ETF issuers seeking novel ways to provide exposure to digital assets within a traditional 1940 Act ETF-wrapper. He also represents private equity funds and private trusts that offer exposure to various cryptocurrencies.

Morrison regularly advises closed-end funds and their advisers on initial public offerings and follow-on rights offerings and oversaw one of the first instances of an interval fund publicly listing its shares on a national securities exchange. He is also part of a Chapman team that regularly serves as fund counsel for the initial offering of approximately 900 unit investment trusts annually.