Our Team
Monument Strategies enjoys strategic partnerships with Meeks, Butera & Israel and the McPherson Group - two firms with a comprehensive and influential government relations practice located in Washington, D.C. Our firms share mutual clients and as a result are in day-to-day contact with each other working together as a team and delivering success in lobbying, crisis management and media relations.
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Robert S. Royer
Contact: By E-mail
Robert Royer is a partner in Royer & Brooks, LLP and The McPherson Group, LLP, both specializing in regulatory and legislative matters relating to the financial services industry (domestic and multi-national banking institutions, thrifts, credit unions and securities firms), the taxation of multi-national corporations, transportation and public utilities regulation and legislation, and precious metals and domestic and international mining activities.
Before entering private practice, Mr. Royer served as Legal and Legislative Counsel to the Securities Industry Association and also served as General Counsel to the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress and Counsel to the House Administration Committee of the United States Congress. Mr. Royer has served as Special Counsel for Capital Markets to the Subcommittee on International Development Institutions and Finance of the Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives. Mr. Royer has also served as Special Counsel to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the Helsinki Commission).
Most recently, Mr. Royer was named one of the five most influential lobbyists for the financial services industry.
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Ryan D. Israel
Contact: By E-mail
Ryan D. Israel is one of the founding partners of the Washington, DC-based law firm, Meeks, Butera & Israel PLLC. With over 20 years of legal and federal policy-making experience, he specializes in the areas of financial services, tax, health care, and business formation and helps clients advance their legal and public policy objectives on Capitol Hill and before federal executive branch agencies. He also advises clients on government ethics, campaign finance, and lobbying disclosure laws, including Federal Election Commission and state election law obligations.
Israel spent four years on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide to a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee from his home state of Illinois. Following law school, Israel began his legal career in 2002 at the government affairs law firm of Butera & Andrews in DC where he represented a wide variety of financial services and trade group clients. Prior to establishing his current firm, he spent seven years as Special Counsel to one of the largest law firms in the southeastern United States.
Israel holds a Juris Doctor degree from the Pepperdine University School of Law in California where he was a Fellow and Founding Student Board Member of the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Law, and a Bachelor of Arts degree, with honors, from the George Washington University in Washington, DC.
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Harry T. Spikes II
Contact: By E-mail
Harry Spikes has extensive experience in leading teams in serving the people of Baltimore and Maryland. For 15 years, Harry served in the office of the late U.S. Congressman Elijah E. Cummings who represented Maryland’s 7th Congressional District. As Congressman Cummings’ District Director, Harry specialized in the sustainability of quality, affordable and safe housing for all people through property acquisition, foreclosure prevention, homeless services, utility services, community safety, lead abatement, landlord/tenant rights, and witness protection.
Harry specialized in Social Security programs and helped recover nearly $1 million in retroactive benefits for families from the Social Security Administration. Harry also worked on health policy. During his tenure serving Maryland’s 7th Congressional District, he won a major victory by helping to create policy that helps men that are diagnosed with prostate cancer, in the metastatic stage. Under this policy, men receive full disability benefits from the Social Security Administration through a program called the Compassionate Allowance List. Now, over 180,000 men per year receive full SSA benefits. As of this year, over 1,440,000 men’s lives have been saved.
Harry also was Executive Director of Baltimore City Bon Secours Community works where he operated over 120 million in affordable housing assets, Work Force Development and Early Head Start.
As an extension of his community service, Harry serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Community Assistance Network, which is the largest non-profit organization in Baltimore County that helps families and individuals who are homeless. Harry has also partnered with Habitat for Humanity and traveled to Haiti and Malawi, Africa to study disaster relief and build homes for impoverished families.
Harry has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Morgan State University and a Masters of Public Administration in Public and Policy Administration from University of Baltimore. -
George LeMaistre, Jr.
Contact: By E-mail
George LeMaistre, Jr., retired in 2017 after some 40 years of practicing law with firms in Mobile, Alabama, and Washington, D.C. His work primarily involved representing clients in the financial services industry in respect to regulatory and compliance issues, mergers and other combinations, litigation, corporate governance, and government affairs. He provided advice on the development, evaluation, and refinement of policies and programs to enable financial institutions to comply with the federal Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and to formulate effective Anti-Money Laundering (AML) programs, and on the implications and expected effects of proposed or enacted legislation, as well as drafting congressional testimony and legislative language.
George acted as counsel to independent committees appointed by corporate boards of directors to investigate allegations of corporate misconduct, and represented for-profit and nonprofit corporations, federal and state government agencies, and individuals, in matters related to corporate and other activities subject to federal and state laws, regulations, and policies. He also represented financial institutions, and individual officers and directors, in enforcement proceedings brought by federal or state regulatory agencies. Other clients whom he represented included individual corporate officers and directors who testified as witnesses for the government in federal and state criminal prosecutions in New York City, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. Since retiring from law practice, he has provided consulting services on federal financial regulatory and legislative matters.
Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, George was educated in the public schools there and at Indian Springs School. He is a 1970 magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College, where he was editor-in-chief of the college's daily student newspaper and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After college, he worked first as a volunteer, and later a paid staff member, for U.S. Rep. John Culver, of Iowa, and as a reporter and photographer for a daily newspaper in the Mississippi Delta, the Delta Democrat-Times, of Greenville, Mississippi.
After graduating from Columbia Law School, George served in 1975-76 as a law clerk for Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, in Montgomery. He then practiced with a Washington, D.C., law firm for nearly four years until, in 1981, he joined a group of long-standing friends who had established a firm in Mobile, Alabama, where he continued to practice until he retired.
From 1995-2004 and 2006-2015, George was a member of the Board of Trustees of Stillman College, also serving in 2000-01 as Secretary of the Board, and from 2001 until 2004 as its Vice Chair. Since 2018 he has been a director of the Stillman College Foundation.
George and his wife, Jenny, live in Tuscaloosa with their dog and her cat.
