William Clayton is a business law scholar whose work focuses primarily on the law and policy of private markets. He is a leading researcher in the area of private equity fund contracting and governance, and his scholarship and comment letters have been cited extensively in Securities and Exchange Commission rule-making on private investment funds. Clayton's work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Yale Journal on Regulation, and the Harvard Business Law Review, and he is also a contributing author to multiple forthcoming research handbooks on private equity and venture capital. Before joining the BYU Law faculty in 2018, Clayton worked as a corporate lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and as a private funds lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York City, and he was the Executive Director of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law.

Clayton currently serves as one of the directors of BYU's Global Business Law Program, where he has co-organized conferences including the BYU Law Winter Deals Conference in Park City and the 2023 Private Funds Roundtable in New York City. 

Clayton teaches courses on contracts, business organizations, and corporate finance, and he is also the founding director of the BYU Law Deals Academy, an annual immersive transactional law program in New York City for first-year students. BYU Law's first travel academy, the Deals Academy served as an early model for the law school's broader academy program, which was rated among the top 10 national law school programs for "Innovation and Pedagogy" by Bloomberg Law in 2023.

Clayton holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a B.A. from Stanford University.