Harold O. Levy, Managing Director - Special Counsel
Plainfield Asset Management

Harold O. Levy is most well known for having been Chancellor of New York City's public schools for three years from 2000 to 2002 and for having been the first Director of Global Compliance at Citigroup from 1998 to 2000. As Chancellor, he led the nation’s largest school system, with 1.1 million students, 120,000 employees and a $13 billion budget. Mr. Levy’s leadership resulted in improved reading and math scores (including in 2000 the largest ever one-year gain in math scores), clarification of lines of authority, a significant reduction in administrative overhead, creation of critical metrics to improve accountability and initiation of the much-emulated Teaching Fellows program for career changers. He also led the system in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and negotiated a new teacher collective bargaining agreement in 2002.

Prior to becoming Chancellor, from 1985 to 2000, Mr. Levy provided legal expertise at Citigroup, Inc. and its predecessors Travelers Group, Salomon Inc and Philipp Brothers. He was Citigroup’s and Travelers Group’s Associate General Counsel, reporting to Charles O. Prince, subsequently the Citigroup CEO. Mr. Levy handled special assignments, including organizing Citigroup’s Compliance Department, which at the time had 1400 members and was the largest corporate compliance group in the world. He also led the effort to secure state insurance regulatory approvals necessary for the Travelers Group/Citicorp merger and served as liaison to community groups, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/Push Wall Street Project.  Mr. Levy was also Associate General Counsel of Salomon Inc. and Senior Litigation Counsel of Salomon Brothers, Inc. and Philipp Brothers, Inc., where he provided global oversight for litigation and for key regulatory relationships.

From 2002 to 2007, Mr. Levy was Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Kaplan, Inc., where he was in charge of legal, corporate communications, human relations and government affairs. He was a senior executive of the Higher Education Division, which included over 70 for-profit campuses and Kaplan University, an online university with over 60,000 students. He also founded the university’s online School of Education.  Kaplan, Inc. has approximately $2 billion in revenue and 20,000 employees.

Since August 2007, Mr. Levy has been Managing Director – Special Counsel of Plainfield, a special situations/distressed debt hedge fund, where he has led several investment projects, provided legal advice and supervised Plainfield’s government relations activities.  Plainfield has $4 billion under management.

Mr. Levy has long been active in pro bono and community service work. In 1995, Chancellor Ramon Cortines appointed him chair of the New York City Commission on School Facilities and Maintenance Reform, which successfully lobbied for an additional $1 billion for school maintenance and renovations. He was subsequently elected a member of the New York State Board of Regents, where he chaired the Technology and Audit Committees. He also served as Board President of University Settlement, a member of the New York Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange Board, and as Chair of the Drafting Committee, Securities Industry Voluntary Initiative for Political Contributions. Currently, he is a public member of the National Adjudicatory Council of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a member of the Council of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC., Treasurer of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation, a trustee of the Citizens Budget Commission, a member of Citizens Union Foundation Board of Directors and a trustee of Pace University.

Mr. Levy is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. He received his BS and JD from Cornell University and an MA (First Class Honors) from Oxford University. He clerked for the Hon. John T. Curtin in the Western District of New York and was a litigation associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New York. He was Notes Editor of the International Law Journal and a Telluride Scholar at Cornell, and a Lincoln Exchange Scholar at Oxford. He holds Honorary Doctorates from Bard, Baruch (City University of New York), and St. Francis Colleges.

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