Biography

Nicole Iannarone teaches courses including Business Organizations, Civil Procedure, Complex Litigation, Business Arbitration, and Professional Responsibility. Her scholarship focuses on consumer disputes with professional services providers, exploring the intersection between professional regulation, dispute resolution systems, transparency, and technology. She examines average consumers’ experiences in dispute resolution to identify barriers they face in entrenched mandatory arbitration forums and recommends interventions to increase consumers’ access to justice.

Professor Iannarone’s scholarship has appeared in or is forthcoming in the Washington Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Stetson Law Review, Tennessee Journal of Business Law, Chicago Kent Law Review, and the University of Toledo Law Review. She frequently is asked to share her expertise with regulatory and policy making bodies and has been invited to testify before the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission and International Association of Securities Commissioners (IOSCO) on issues relating to consumer investor protection.

Professor Iannarone is involved in national-level engagement in communities related to her scholarly focus. She was appointed Chair of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) National Arbitration and Mediation Committee (NAMC), the advisory group responsible for studying the FINRA mandatory securities dispute resolution forum and recommending changes to FINRA’s board of governors, in 2021. She also serves as a public member of the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) Board of Standards Public Policy Council.

Before joining the faculty in 2019, Professor Iannarone founded the Investor Advocacy Clinic at Georgia State University College of Law where she oversaw students’ representation of consumer investors with small claims in FINRA arbitration. Previously, Professor Iannarone taught at Mercer Law School and at Vanderbilt Law School.

Before entering academia, Professor Iannarone was an equity partner and deputy general counsel in a litigation boutique firm where she represented plaintiffs and defendants in litigation at all levels of state and federal trial and appellate courts. Beginning with her time in law practice and throughout her academic career, Professor Iannarone has been heavily involved in service to the practicing bar, including by serving as President of the Atlanta Bar Association, President of the Atlanta Council of Younger Lawyers, Chair of the State Bar of Georgia’s Professionalism Committee, Chair of the Atlanta Bar Association Reputation and Public Trust Committee and liaison to the Georgia Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism. She is also a former chair of the AALS Section on Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

Professor Iannarone received her JD from Yale Law School, where she served on the Yale Journal on Regulation, and graduated summa cum laude and with high honors in liberal studies from Brenau Women’s College.