Our Team.

Education: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, DePaul University College of Law, Stanford University Graduate School of Business Executive Program

Jim Yong is a member of the Board of Directors and is the Chief Legal and Regulatory Officer of the Dream Exchange.  While acting as the Exchange’s officer, Jim still holds the position of “Of Counsel” to his law firm, O’Hagan Meyer, LLC, and is in the process of divesting his clients to his O’Hagan colleagues who can service his clients.  

Jim has been serving the financial sector for more than 40 years, having worked in the banking and the securities industries, including options, futures, security futures and equity markets. In the corporate world, Jim has worked with self-regulatory organizations (“SROs”), having been appointed as the General Counsel, first with The Options Clearing Corporation (and its futures subsidiary, the Intermarket Clearing Corporation) and then with the National Stock Exchange. He was also the National Stock Exchange’s first Chief Regulatory Officer and its affiliated broker-dealer’s first Chief Compliance Officer. Jim has been his SRO’s representative on a number of regulatory and industry committees, including acting as the Executive Representative to FINRA, and was the voting member of the Intermarket Surveillance Group (including chairing some of its subcommittees), the Securities Industry Committee on Arbitration, the International Organization of Securities Commissioners (“IOSCO”) and the North American Securities Administrators Association (“NASAA”). Jim has experience in matters involving the development of new products (and their disclosures) with securities and options exchanges; creating and obtaining approval of the SRO’s rule filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”); advocating policy concerns of a national stock exchange and clearing firm with their regulators and Congress; resolving legal and operational issues raised by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the “FRB”), the SEC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”), state blue sky commissioners and other regulators.

In private practice, Jim focused on counseling entities regulated by the SEC, CFTC, and other state and federal regulators.  He has helped a client become the second market to be approved by the CFTC as a designated contract market for a security futures product and another to become one of the ten entities recognized as an Electronic Communications Network (“ECN”) by the SEC. Jim also assisted his clients on the regulatory front, including advising clients on how to strengthen their compliance and regulatory programs and defending clients with regulatory issues before federal and state regulators and the SROs. Jim has also counseled others in the financial services area, including serving as counsel to the independent directors of the issuer of exchange-traded funds, as well as acting as counsel to various boards of directors for broker-dealers and registered investment advisers.

Jim’s governmental experience includes work as an enforcement attorney with the SEC and externships with the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and with a United States Magistrate for the Northern District of Illinois.