Robert MacDonald

Our Proposition

We offer our clients a compelling combination of elite multi-national law firm and Fortune 100 Company in-house experience and expertise, an accessible and nimble style, and value for money. In short, top tier sophistication on a human scale.

Client Focus

We serve mid-market companies, start-ups and emerging companies, family offices, angel, VC, and private equity investors, and large companies for whom a large firm is overkill for the task at hand. We focus on overseas clients with US activities, companies expanding into or out of the US, domestic early stage companies, and investors.

Legal Services

MacDonald Weiss covers the core business-related practice areas: corporate, M&A, securities, finance, commercial, and tax. We also act as US – or global – outside general counsel, and with our extensive legal contacts within the US and around the world we can assemble the best global team our clients need to handle the job.

Rob MacDonald has 30 years of legal experience in the areas of transactions, commercial, corporate, finance, tax, and “outside general counsel” activity, at the highest levels of sophistication. He has focused particularly on international work, both “in-bound” and “out-bound.” In the transactional context, Rob has deep experience with, inter alia, investment funds, joint ventures, partnerships, other companies, and all aspects of debt and equity finance, from simple to exotic. On the commercial side, he has handled projects ranging from distribution of goods to software licensing. Rob began his career as a tax lawyer, achieving prominence in that area in his first decade of practice, and he continues to maintain a substantial amount of tax practice today. Rob also has extensive experience acting as “outside general counsel” for US and non-US companies, and in that context he has accumulated a broad range of experience ranging from litigation strategy to securities law. His clients have ranged from the world’s largest banks to dot-com start-ups.

In MacDonald Weiss and before, as the former managing partner of the NY office of Gide Loyrette Nouel, one of France’s most prominent law firms, Rob has represented a primarily European clientele. He is sensitive to the different business, legal, and social contexts from which French and other European clients operate, which enables him to shape more understandable, more effective advice to those clients. He speaks French.