Greenville's Leading Lawyers - Neil Grayson
Band 1
CORPORATE M&A: BANKING & FINANCE
Neil Grayson, Partner
Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP
Greenville native Neil Grayson, who “started several little businesses…including a worm farm” while he was in high school, earned a BA in accounting and economics from Wofford before moving on to USC Law. He developed an interest in law from his attorney father and from the securities fraud class action suit in which his former worm farm materials supplier was involved. That event “helped spark my interest in securities laws, and that is what I focused on in law school,” he says.
After law school, he practiced securities and corporate law for about four years in New York with Cravath, Swaine & Moore before moving to Atlanta to work with a firm that specialized in community banks. In 1992, he and several others left the firm to start the Nelson Mullins Atlanta office where he worked until he moved to the Greenville office in 2003.
Grayson heads up the firm’s Financial Institutions Practice Group, which includes more than 70 attorneys in 12 offices. “I believe we represent more banks in South Carolina than any other law firm, and we have one of the largest financial institutions practices in the Southeast,” he says. “I particularly enjoy handling matters that are unusual and complicated. In the past year, for example, we handled the $105 million recapitalization of The Palmetto Bank, the $65 million restructuring of The Cliffs Communities, Inc., and one of the few successful capital raises by a Florida bank that has been deemed to be in troubled condition.”