Gordon Arata celebrates firm member Peggy Welsh, recently named a 2022 New Orleans CityBusiness Women of the Year honoree. Marion Weinstock, a member of the firm’s management committee and prior CityBusiness Women of the Year honoree said, “Peggy represents the best of our firm. She is a leader among our ranks, embodying our commitment to offering superlative client service while delivering an extraordinary work product and giving back to our communities.”

Peggy serves clients in a wide variety of complex transactional matters, including multi-million-dollar acquisitions and sales, deal finance, corporate governance and real estate. She advises clients in a variety of industries, including banking; chemical, industrial and manufacturing; energy, natural resources and renewable energy; and commercial real estate, to name a few. Peggy has served as lead counsel on financings of acquisitions of commercial property, including negotiating the exit of the seller from a new market tax credit structure. She routinely drafts and negotiates purchase and sale agreements, credit agreements, leases, mortgages and transition service agreements. Peggy also assists numerous companies with their general corporate matters, including entity formation, corporate restructurings and general corporate governance. In addition, she has experience in state and federal regulatory matters, particularly with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

Kelly Perrier, a colleague of Peggy’s at Gordon Arata, said, “Peggy is an enthusiastic and compassionate leader in everything she does. As a lawyer, she tackles both the complex and mundane with equal resolve and pragmatism.  Her clients trust her judgment and appreciate her responsiveness and attention to detail. She cares deeply about her clients and the people with whom she works. She founded Gordon Arata’s “Sunshine” Committee to enhance morale, foster camaraderie, and promote teamwork, and she successfully initiated and co-chairs the firm’s 1L Diversity Summer Clerkship, to advance Gordon Arata’s commitment to increasing and maintaining a diverse workplace and building an environment of inclusion that reflects the communities and clients it serves.”

Peggy equally leads in her community.  While working for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, she founded the organization’s Education Advocacy Program. For several years, Peggy has been active in and served on the Board of Directors of Propeller, a non-profit force for social innovation whose core mission is to grow and support entrepreneurs to tackle social and environmental disparities in New Orleans. Propeller has graduated 300+ entrepreneurs who collectively have generated over $262 million in revenue and financing and created nearly 500 full- and part-time jobs for New Orleanians. Peggy currently serves as Propeller’s Vice Chair.