Jonathan D. Herpy, Sr.

Jonathan D. Herpy, Sr. is Senior Partner of Hart David Carson LLP, which he co-founded with Joel J.H. Funk in June 2013 in Downers Grove, Illinois. The firm opened as Hart David LLP, took its present name in 2017, and today has 63 attorneys and its principal office at One East Erie Street in Chicago. Jonathan's practice is middle-market and pre-IPO mergers and acquisitions, private equity, capital markets and private capital, and M&A is the largest part of it. He advises investors, sponsors and managers across the investment spectrum on acquisitions, leveraged buyouts and corporate restructurings, domestic and international, and on public and private offerings of equity and debt. He also built the firm's international and offshore structuring practice and leads its digital-assets work. Private-equity and hedge-fund principals come to him to establish family offices and structures that preserve and deploy capital across generations.

Two frontiers, 2014

The offshore practice began in 2014 with high-frequency trading firms and the families behind them, then widened to private clients and their fiduciaries across many jurisdictions, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man and Anguilla among them. It predates the Panama Papers of 2016, did not pause when they broke, and has run through every disclosure regime adopted since. The firm works with locally admitted counsel in about 51 jurisdictions.

Since 2014 he has been among the nation's go-to counsel for digital-asset businesses, funds and exchanges. That record begins with corporate-side work recovering assets after the 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox. In 2014 and 2015 he helped build one of the first digital-asset fund structures in the Bahamas, then multi-jurisdiction offshore structures for the digital-asset funds, hedge funds and family offices that followed. Since 2015 the firm has represented digital-asset exchanges on regulatory and compliance matters, Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and OKX among them, money-transmitter licensing included. The practice covers fund formation, token and offering structuring, and exchange and money-transmission licensing, along with KYC, AML and Travel Rule compliance.

Deal, structure, regulator

He works where the deal, the structure and the tax position meet, which is also where the regulators tend to be. The firm has represented clients before the SEC, the CFTC and the IRS, and its docket extends to the FTC and the FAA. It has appeared before securities regulators in 48 states and taxing authorities in 35, and its state tax clients have included United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines. A Forbes contributor since 2020, he speaks at conferences on digital assets and payments.

Before the firm

Jonathan came to the firm from professional sports, where from 2010 he worked for an agency and then through his own practice representing athletes. When Uber first reached Chicago, he arranged rides for visiting NFL players in exchange for their social-media promotion of the brand, then brought in the DuPage County chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving to launch a relationship between Uber and the NFL that continues today. He went store to store on Michigan Avenue to find partners for his players. Kiehl's agreed to monthly care packages, which became its first social-media campaign in professional sports. Lululemon made him attend its yoga classes for weeks before agreeing to an athlete program, which grew into the Lululemon Ambassador Program. He has appeared on ESPN and still represents NFL, NBA and MLB players and coaches on contracts, public relations and family-office structuring.

The work has not changed since 2013: capital that has to move, and a structure that holds when it does.