Robert M. Saunders

Mr. Saunders is an accomplished bankruptcy and transactional attorney with broad national practice experience. His range and depth of expertise includes chapter 11 reorganizations and sales, out-of-court workouts, debt/equity financings, corporate and real estate transactions, entity structure and governance strategies, employee and union matters, and litigation. He represents debtors, committees, creditors, acquirers, trustees, and examiners in bankruptcy cases. He counsels lenders and borrowers in restructuring troubled domestic and international debt and equity investments, and structures new money transactions to reduce bankruptcy risk. He has extensive experience litigating and negotiating with governmental agencies, including the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). He litigated and negotiated a hard-fought settlement of over $3.2 billion in Superfund claims with the EPA and major paper makers resulting in no liability for our paper making client, and drafted and confirmed a contested chapter 11 plan (and resolved appeals), providing meaningful distributions to the client's creditors. He also settled claims, and negotiated the assumption of retiree plans with the PBGC and unions, resolving pension and retiree benefit liabilities in three mega-chapter 11 cases.

Mr. Saunders has negotiated and closed billions of dollars of debt, equity, and municipal financings for lenders, investors and borrowers. He counsels financial clients investing in complex commercial real-estate projects and private companies. As a title agent in Florida, he wrote multi-million dollar policies to facilitate real estate closings. He also successfully closed the first issue of stripped mortgage- backed securities issued by a federally chartered mortgage association and the first issue of uncertificated tax-exempt securities by a state.

He is included in the 2018 and 2019 editions of Best Lawyers in America for his work in Bankruptcy and Creditor Debtor Rights/Insolvency and Reorganization Law and Litigation - Bankruptcy. Mr. Saunders is a 1983 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. He is admitted in California, New York and Florida.