Joele Frank is the founder and managing partner of Joele Frank. The firm has consistently ranked as a top M&A firm since its inception in 2000. Among her many professional accolades, Joele has been named to Inside PR's Hall of Fame as an All-Star for Investor Relations and has appeared on PR Week's PR Power List of the 25 top PR industry leaders. She has also been selected for the 2011 National Association of Corporate Directors Directorship 100. Joele is:
A Trusted Advisor: For more than 25 years, Joele has been a trusted advisor to her clients. While best known for work on M&A transactions and defending companies against shareholder activism, over 40 percent of the firm's clients rely on the firm for ongoing investor and public relations support.
Joele and her colleagues have defended against Carl Icahn and Starboard more than 20 times each, Relational and Pershing Square approximately ten times each, and against ValueAct, Elliott, Trian and others numerous times. Some notable assignments include:
- Procter & Gamble, General Growth Properties and Target against Pershing Square;
- Oshkosh, Clorox and Lionsgate against Carl Icahn;
- L-3 Communications, Illinois Tool Works and Sovereign Bancorp against Relational; and
- AOL, Avid Technology and Progress Software against Starboard.
Earlier in her career Joele served as Vice Chairman of Abernathy MacGregor Frank, where she led the firm's mergers and acquisitions and crisis communications practices, and as a Managing Director at Ogilvy Adams & Rinehart, a corporate and financial public relations firm. Joele spent seven years in AT&T's treasury department and worked closely with the investment community during the divestiture of the Bell System. She began her corporate career as a senior financial analyst at Allied Chemical. Before that, Joele specialized in DNA replication as a research biochemist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Joele received an AB in chemistry from Mount Holyoke College and an MBA in finance from Long Island University. She is a member of the Financial Women's Association, The Economic Club of New York and The Committee of 200, as well as a Board member of The Museum at FIT.