Alfred O. Rose is an American lawyer and retired partner of the Boston firm Ropes & Gray. He graduated from Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, joined Ropes & Gray in 1983, and became known for corporate work in private equity, leveraged buyouts, and federal securities law.
Education
Rose graduated from Dartmouth College summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1979. Founded in 1769 in Hanover, New Hampshire, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges established before the American Revolution and a member of the Ivy League. Its founding mission centered on Christian education, including instruction for Native Americans, and the college admitted women to its degree program only in 1972.
He continued his legal education at Yale Law School, where he received a Juris Doctor in 1982. Yale Law School is one of the leading law schools in the United States, located in New Haven, Connecticut, and its origins date to 1824.
Career
Rose's first professional post was in federal court. From 1982 to 1983 he served as a law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, a trial court within the federal judiciary.
In 1983 he joined Ropes & Gray in Boston. The firm was founded in 1865 by John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray, both Harvard Law School graduates, and it adopted the permanent name Ropes & Gray in 1961. Its practice grew during the twentieth century, and by the 1960s it had nearly seventy-five attorneys. Rose worked in the firm's corporate department, where his practice focused on leveraged buy-outs, structured financial products, federal securities law, mergers and acquisitions, and the restructuring of financial-services companies. He later became a partner and subsequently retired from that role.
Among his notable transactions was the SunGard Data Systems buyout. In 2015 he co-wrote a Harvard Law School Forum post on the Securities and Exchange Commission's views on private equity with Randall W. Bodner, a fellow partner at the firm. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1984 and to the New York bar in 2014.
