Rafael X. Zahralddin-Aravena is a Shareholder, Director, and Chair of his firm’s Commercial Bankruptcy and Restructuring Practice. He founded the Elliott Greenleaf Delaware office in 2007 which spec ializes in business law, as its first Managing Shareholder. He works as a litigator and advises businesses on issues of compliance, corporate formation, corporate governance, insolvency, distressed mergers and acquisition, commercial transactions, cyber law, and international and cross border issues. He is also a Six Sigma Greenbelt and has lectured and trained in-house and outside law firms in legal project management, lean practices, and Six Sigma application to value added provision of legal services. He is rated by Martindale Hubble as AV Preeminent.
He has been lead counsel in several significant matters including serving as special litigation counsel in Washington Mutual, the largest bank insolvency in U.S. history. In the Nortel bankruptcies he successfully secured a settlement of more than $50 million for the permanently disabled former employees of the company. The firm and Mr. Zahralddin were named among the firms that received multiple awards in 2014, culminating in the Large Company Transaction of the Year Award from the Turnaround Management Association for their work in the AgFeed USA, Inc. bankruptcy, which involved the sale of the U.S. and China assets of a publicly traded company.
He has held various leadership positions in the American Bar Association, including in the Business Law Section and the Section of International Law. He is a Co-Editor of the Reorganizing Failing Businesses treatise published by the American Bar Association where he is also a co-author for several chapters, including chapters on creditors and equity shareholders committees, employee issues, and corporate governance and fiduciary duties in a distressed situation. He has also held various leadership positions within the American Bankruptcy Institute, where he is the current co-chair of the ABI International Committee and serves as an Advisory Board Member for the ABI Cross-Border Insolvency Conference.
Mr. Zahralddin is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors, a 2015 Leadership Council on Legal Diversity Fellow, and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation (Membership in The Fellows is limited to less than one percent of lawyers licensed to practice in each jurisdiction). He served as the General Counsel for the Hispanic National Bar Association and as a member of its Executive Committee and Board of Governors for more than a decade. He was also the founding President of the Delaware Hispanic Bar Association. He has served in various positions of leadership throughout the American Bar Association Business Law Section and International Law Section and in the American Society of International Law where he is currently an Education Director for the International Committee of the American Bankruptcy Institute.
In 2014, the Minority Corporate Counsel Association’s Diversity and the Bar Magazine recognized him on their annual list of 15 Rainmakers. He received the Delaware State Bar Association’s MJL “Excellence in Community Service Award” in 2016. He also was recognized as a Top Latino Lawyer in the December 2016 Latino Leaders Magazine.
Mr. Zahralddin clerked for The Honorable Samuel L. Bufford of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California. He was also a member of the founding faculty and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of Law at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California. He taught torts, international commercial transactions, securities law, and international and comparative law as a full time academic. He has been published in various law reviews in the areas of international commercial transactions, securities, compliance, corporate law, intellectual property, securities law, and international and comparative law. He has also been published in various practice and trade periodicals and regularly participates in panels and webinars.
He has a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from Delaware Law School where he served as an Articles Editor for the law review and was published as a law student. He received his LLM in International and Comparative Law from Georgetown University Law Center where he was a Senior Writing Fellow. Mr. Zahralddin is also fluent in Spanish.
He is admitted to practice in Delaware, Pennsylvania, California, New York, the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court.
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