PEOPLE

Christopher W. Michael, Founder and managing shareholder

Chris has facilitated the transfer of roughly $750m in capital assets to over 3,000 workers in the course of more than 20 transactions. He is responsible for developing the Employee Ownership Trust as a new financial and legal mechanism in the United States and has published articles introducing the concept in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Tax Notes and Probate & Property. He is also a professor at Rutgers University, where he is a director of the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. Chris holds a BA from Columbia University and a JD/PhD from the City University of New York, where he spent a decade researching the economic, historical, and legal foundations of employee ownership, and authored a book manuscript on the economic history of employee-owned businesses.