Charlie Perkins is a Senior Counsellor at the Hawthorn Group. He specializes in helping companies, universities, non-profits and individuals deal with such highly sensitive issues as:
- High profile litigation
- Corporate reorganizations and management change
- Wrongful termination
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Shareholder activist campaigns
- Sexual harassment in the workplace and historic sexual abuse in schools
Charlie served as Director of Public Relations for the Americas for Ernst & Young for ten years. He joined at Ernst & Young during a time that the accounting profession came under strong scrutiny from the media, regulators and elected officials. He also served as Global Director of Communications for the global law firm, Baker & McKenzie.
Charlie has worked on a wide range of highly visible crisis situations. While at Ernst & Young, he advised senior management on the SEC and New York State Attorney’s investigations of its audit work for Lehman Brothers prior to its bankruptcy, on tax shelter issues that formed the basis of a 60 Minutes story, allegations of insider trading and many other issues. He helped create a thought-leadership campaign to position Ernst & Young as a leader in helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses.
Prior to joining Ernst & Young, Charlie was Executive Vice President and head of Weber Shandwick Worldwide’s Corporate Reputation Practice in New York, counseling senior executives regarding high-profile crisis situations and transactions, and he held a similar role at Edelman as Chair of the firm’s Global Corporate Reputation Practice.
Charlie was Senior Vice President and Director of Public Affairs of Prudential Securities Incorporated, the investment and brokerage firm, from 1995 to 2000. He helped the firm deal with the SEC and NASDAQ investigations of the sales of risky limited partnerships in the 1980s, which led to unprecedented settlements with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.
Prior to joining Prudential Securities, Charlie was Executive Vice President of the Sawyer Miller Group (now Weber Shandwick Worldwide), specializing in advising companies on a wide range of crisis situations, including bankruptcies and mergers and acquisitions. He also served as a Senior Vice President within the crisis management unit of Hill & Knowlton.
Charlie has also served as press secretary and communications advisor in numerous political campaigns, including Rudolph Giuliani’s initial two campaigns for Mayor of New York and the Senate campaigns of Bill Bradley and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. He served as New York City’s Assistant Housing Commissioner in the Koch Administration and as a Special Assistant to former New York City Council President Carol Bellamy.
A graduate of Harvard College, Charlie has an MA from the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University, an MBA from New York University’s Graduate School of Business Administration and a certificate from the Securities Industry Institute of the Wharton School of Management.
