William Blair & Company's sales, trading, and underwriting efforts originate in Chicago, along with our Private Client Advisors Department. William Blair & Company’s municipal department consists of one underwriter, three traders, and more than 30 institutional sales professionals with an average of 20 years of experience. With one of the largest sales and trading staffs in the Midwest, our Sales and Underwriting Group provides the firm with the ability to deliver superior distribution and pricing results for our issuing clients.

Distribution Network
William Blair & Company has one of the largest institutional fixed-income salesforces in the Midwest, with 10 institutional salespeople focused solely on municipal bonds and another 20 salespeople who cover tax-exempt and taxable accounts. Our success in distributing bonds stems in large part from the strong ongoing and substantive relationships that we maintain with more than 700 institutional buyers. These investors include life and casualty insurance companies, money-market and mutual funds, pension funds, commercial banks, asset managers, land investment advisors, proprietary accounts, and other institutions.

In addition to these professionals, our retail salesforce consists of more than 50 brokers and 30 other professionals who work in our Private Client Advisors Department. These professionals cater to high-net-worth individuals and manage more than $8.5 billion in assets.

Syndication
William Blair & Company's goal in the underwriting process is to consistently outperform our competitors and provide the lowest cost of financing for our clients. Over the past three years, William Blair & Company has consistently been the No. 1 regional underwriter of Illinois municipal debt. In 2007, we underwrote about $750 million of Illinois’ tax-exempt debt, comprising 56 issues. We also actively underwrite credits in Iowa, Indiana, and Connecticut. Our clients include states, counties, cities and towns, school districts, forest preserves, park districts, colleges and universities, museums, hospitals, and other nonprofits. William Blair & Company is also active in the competitive market. We bid and run accounts weekly throughout the country.

Variable Rate Portfolio
William Blair & Company participated in the development of the variable-rate market in the early 1980s and since that time has been active as a managing underwriter and remarketing agent. We serve as remarketing agent for more than 100 variable-rate issues aggregating almost $2 billion, and ranging in size from $1 million to $245 million. We regularly use our capital to support our remarketing function.

Trading
William Blair & Company's trading desk maintains an active inventory of investment-grade municipals ranging from one year to 30 years. The rating characteristics of our inventory range from AA to AAA credits with insurance. These rating characteristics meet the needs of our institutional accounts and high-net-worth investors.