Gina A. Hough

Gina A. Hough is a Washington, D.C.-based housing finance attorney with nearly 40 years of experience and a national practice in mortgage finance that is exceeded in scope only by her reputation in the field. She represents mortgage lenders in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac execution, and has counseled multiple Fortune 500 companies in multifamily finance for over 15 years.

Gina joined Fannie Mae in 1993 as associate general counsel in the Fannie Mae Legal Department. In that role, she was responsible for handling technology transactions to procure the technology goods and services to run the voluminous systems that keep Fannie Mae operational.

Within weeks of her arrival at the company, then-vice chairman Franklin D. Raines launched a division within the CIO organization to automate single-family mortgage processing from application, to underwriting, to closing. Consequently, Gina became in-house counsel to the CIO and immersed herself in the legal work of creating a licensable framework for Fannie Mae’s innovations.

In 1998, the Federal Circuit handed down the State Street case, making business methods patentable. Charged with the task of building a patent portfolio, Gina designed and implemented an enterprise- wide IP audit of Fannie Mae's methods of doing business. This work led to the creation of one of the first financial services IP asset portfolios in the nation, which at the time of her departure from Fannie Mae, numbered over 300 patent applications and many hundreds of other IP assets (e.g., trademarks, trade names, copyrights, and business methods protected by trade secrets to name a few).

In 1997, while still at Fannie Mae, Gina played a pivotal role in the formation of a partnership between Fannie Mae and Howard University that created the groundbreaking Le Droit Park Initiative. This effort restored 45 Howard University properties into affordable home ownership opportunities for low-income Howard employees and local firefighters, police officers, and public school teachers.

Always holding the impact and success of LeDroit Park in her mind and heart, when Gina returned to private law practice, she turned from IP transactions to multifamily real estate transactions. Over the years, she has built a practice of comprehensive scope, working on all manner of GSE multifamily finance, and developing a team capable of all financing executions. She leads that team today at Ballard Spahr.