Carmen E. Halford

Carmen Halford joined the Transactional Law Clinics of Harvard Law School as a Clinical Instructor in 2021. She is also the Supervising Attorney for the HLS Recording Artists Project where she supervises student teams representing clients in cases on the cutting edge of music law. For Fall of 2024 she is teaching a first-of-its-kind reading group: Second Chance Entrepreneurship – barriers and opportunities to achieve financial independence for the formerly incarcerated.

Carmen’s research interests currently center on the legal profession’s role in constructing, perpetuating and dismantling economic barriers facing returning citizens and other marginalized communities in efforts to start and sustain entrepreneurial ventures.

Before coming to Harvard, Carmen worked as a transactional associate at the New York firm Kleinberg, Kaplan, Wolff & Cohen, P.C. where she concentrated her practice on mergers and acquisitions, including music catalogs, debt and equity financings and general corporate matters. She regularly counseled individuals as well as U.S. and foreign enterprises across a wide breadth of industries, cultivating extensive experience in primary and secondary equity sales of private companies, secured and unsecured financings and other complex commercial transactions and also acted as outside general counsel to many of her clients. Prior to that position, Carmen was a global transactions associate at the New York office of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. Carmen also maintained an active and diverse pro bono practice touching on matters from asylum, city property tax exemptions and music licensing agreements.

Carmen obtained her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. in International Studies with a minor in Chinese Studies from the University of South Carolina. Prior to her legal studies, Carmen worked in the marketing department of CBS Interactive (China) in Beijing.