DAVID JAFFE
David Jaffe is the principal of Jaffe Counsel. He provides strategic counsel to businesses and business leaders facing significant opportunities, challenges, and transformations.
David focuses on compliance and ethics programs, policies, and implementation. He also works on corporate governance for businesses and non-profits, consults with legal and compliance leaders, and advises on international joint ventures. He help build compliance programs that build a profitable culture of doing the right thing and legal functions that meet business needs.
Since founding Jaffe Counsel in 2014, David has played key strategic roles for his clients. He built a legal function, and a compliance and ethics program for an $800 million NYSE-listed multinational, and helped build copmliance programs and policies for large and small organizations. He is guiding a family-owned business toward ownership and governance transition when the CEO retires, serving on the company’s Board of Directors and Advisory Board. He advised an S&P 500 company that was beginning its international expansion. He has provided insight and recommendations to general counsel on strategy, developing their legal function, and selecting and managing outside lawyers.
Before starting Jaffe Counsel, David was Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Guardian Industries Corp., a $5 billion multinational manufacturing company. He joined Guardian in 1990 and served as General Counsel from 2007 to 2014. David led Guardian’s worldwide legal function as the company grew. He built and implemented its first compliance function. He was responsible for corporate governance, shareholder relations, the worldwide environmental function, and crisis communications.
David played leading legal and business roles in Guardian’s expansion from five countries to 27. He guided the company through governance and other challenges.
Before joining Guardian, he was a partner at Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn in Detroit. David served as a law clerk to Justice William Rehnquist at the Supreme Court of the United States and to Chief Judge James Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He attended the University of Chicago, where he received a J.D. with honors in 1981 and a B.A. in Economics with honors in 1978. In law school, he was a research assistant to Edward H. Levi, Attorney General of the United States under President Ford.
In 24 years as a business and legal leader at Guardian, David gained insight into the real world consequences of business, compliance, and legal decisions. David was known for his integrity, business acumen and ability to work collaboratively across the business at all levels. He is effective across borders, cultures and legal systems.
Beyond ability, integrity and people skills, business leadership requires judgment. In many challenging business situations, David has demonstrated sound judgment, the courage to act on that judgment, and the discipline not to rush to judgment.
David currently serves as Board Chair of Detroit Public Theatre, and as Director and Chair of the Governance Committee at Gesher Human Services. His civic involvement has included serving as Board Chair of Jesuit Program for Living and Learning of Michigan and President of the Detroit Chapter of the American Jewish Committee. He has been a director and executive committee member at Music Hall Center for Performing Arts, JVS, The Roeper School, the International School of Luxembourg, Jewish Family Service, and the Detroit Urban League. David has also served as a director at the Michigan Chamber of Commerce.