Amanda Steele

AMANDA is the first female director of the Bankruptcy & Corporate Restructuring Group at Richards, Layton & Finger, P.A., where she focuses her practice on corporate restructuring, bankruptcy and other insolvency matters. She regularly represents and advises debtors, secured lenders, creditors and other interested parties in all aspects of chapter 11 cases, as well as foreign representatives in chapter 15 ancillary proceedings. She also is a member of the firm’s substantive nonconsolidation opinion team. Previously, she interned for Hon. Justice Henry duPont Ridgely and for the Villanova University School of Law’s Federal Tax Clinic. During law school, she received the Dr. Arthur Clement Pulling Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Villanova Law Review.

Amanda served as vice chair of the Delaware State Bar Association’s Young Lawyer’s Section (New Castle County) from 2013-15, and she chaired the International Women’s Insolvency & Restructuring Confederation’s (IWIRC’s) Delaware Network from 2019-20. She has been listed in Chambers USA since 2017 and in The Best Lawyers in America since 2023, and she was listed in Super Lawyers from 2018-20 and as a Delaware Today “Top Lawyer” from 2021- 22. She also was an IWIRC Rising Star Award Finalist in 2016. In addition, she serves on ABI’s Mid-Atlantic Bankruptcy Workshop Advisory Board, and she served on the planning committee for the IWIRC at the Shore regional conference.

When Amanda began her career at the firm, she knew very little about insolvency practice. She was asked to assist co-counsel at the first Washington Mutual confirmation hearing, organizing all the documents needed for the multi-week trial. She quickly made an organizational system for the over 90 boxes that were sent to court each day. She subsequently became part of the Washington Mutual team for nine years until the cases were closed. As her career has developed, she has had the opportunity to be involved in all aspects on many of the largest chapter 11 cases filed in Delaware. At her firm, she developed, and each year conducts, the training program for first-year associates in her group. Outside of the office, she is a pro bono child attorney for the Delaware Division of Family Services, where she represents children in foster care, and she has served on the Strategic Planning Committee and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Steering Committee of the Ronald McDonald House of Delaware.