Roger Maldonado

ROGER is a member of Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP’s Finance and Restructuring group. He represents creditors, lenders and investment firms, among others, in a full range of financial matters, including complex financial transactions, corporate debt restructurings, distressed-asset purchases and related litigation matters. His biggest passion is working with lenders across the country to find business solutions to the most complex distressed loans and transactions.

Roger was three years old when his family immigrated from Honduras. He was raised to understand the need for a good education. During law school, he discovered that he had a passion for litigation and being an excellent communicator. His first job out of law school was as a bankruptcy litigation associate serving on a team that represented the unsecured creditors’ committee in the chapter 11 case of Tom Petters, who committed the third-largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. He knew from that experience that commercial bankruptcy would be his main area of focus. He has since been selected as a Top Lawyer Under 40 in 2021 by the Hispanic National Bar Association and as a 2022 “40 Under 40” honoree by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

Roger is also passionate about his pro bono work representing asylum-seekers, including immigrants from Honduras escaping gang violence and corrupt police, and Chinese citizens fleeing from human rights violations committed by Chinese state authorities. In addition, for more than 20 years he served as a member of the Minnesota National Guard, which he joined after his junior year of high school in order to help pay for college. He deployed to Iraq twice and commissioned as an officer in the University of Minnesota ROTC program. He also has volunteered on numerous professional and nonprofit boards, including the ABI’s Veteran’s Affairs Task Force, TMA’s NexGen Conference Steering Committee, and the Folds of Honor MN chapter, which raises funds to provide educational scholarships to the spouses and children of military members who have fallen or been disabled while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. In addition, he strives to improve diversity in the profession; he has rallied the affinity bars in Minnesota to create a joint committee that would issue an annual diversity report card of the top 25 biggest law firms for law students and legal professionals to have accessible demographic data, and he met individually with general counsels from Fortune 500 companies to support the project.