Spencer Fane LLP recently welcomed Yana Rusovski (Karnaukhov) to the firm’s St. Louis office as an of counsel attorney in the real estate practice group, the company announced in a release.

Focusing on the legal needs of clients in the real estate, finance and government sectors, Rusovski’s practice places a particular emphasis on regulatory compliance, preventative counseling and defending against enforcement actions.

She regularly helps clients identify and manage fair housing and fair lending risks and specializes in developing carefully tailored strategies to resolve disputes in ways that safeguard business goals, reputations and relationships.

Rusovski has experience working with large and small clients, including appraisal management companies, banks, non-bank mortgage lenders, market rate and affordable housing providers, individual property owners, residential and senior living real estate owners, developers, nonprofits, management companies, local governments and housing authorities, industry trade groups and business lenders, the company stated.

“Just as our core practice areas continue to build on foundational principles, the firm offers increasingly specialized services across national markets,” Amy Mistler, office managing partner for Spencer Fane in St. Louis, said in the release. “Yana’s comprehensive public and private sector work combined with her extensive experience achieving beneficial outcomes through arbitration and mediation will be a valuable addition to our diverse client service catalog, especially within the collaborative, cross-office teams she will work closely with.”

Additionally, Rusovski’s record of regulatory work includes experience with the Fair Housing Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, among others; and frequent engagement with federal regulators, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

She has managed, negotiated, and administrated more than $10 million in government contracts and is recognized as an industry leader in negotiating HUD conciliation agreements, while Rusovski’s extensive knowledge has shaped fair housing and fair lending policies.

Prior to entering private practice, Rusovski spent more than a decade working for HUD, where she led and managed investigations and compliance reviews of privately-owned multifamily housing providers, financial institutions, and hundreds of recipients of federal funding, including state governments, cities, counties, municipalities and Public Housing Authorities.