Doneene Damon is President of Richards, Layton & Finger, where she also serves as Co-Chair of the firm’s Business Department and Chair of the Corporate Trust and Agency Services Group. She is widely recognized for her extraordinary leadership and depth of experience in complex commercial and financial transactions.
Ms. Damon focuses her practice on formation and operational issues relating to Delaware statutory trusts and Delaware and New York common law trusts. She represents issuers, underwriters, investors, trustees, banks, and trust companies across a broad range of commercial and capital markets transactions. Her work includes advising clients on common law trusts, statutory trusts, owner trusts, master trusts, series trusts, and titling trusts.
Her corporate trust and agency practice includes representing financial institutions in their roles as trustee, collateral agent, verification agent, custodian, master servicer, depository agent, securities intermediary, paying agent, registrar and transfer agent, and exchange agent under Delaware and New York law. Ms. Damon also represents health-care clients in transactional matters, including the purchase and servicing of health-care receivables and the issuance of tax-exempt bonds.
Ms. Damon has played a leading role in innovative and first-to-market transactions, including serving as primary Delaware counsel in structured finance transactions utilizing blockchain distributed ledger technology.
Her transactional experience spans a wide range of asset classes and structures, including asset-backed securities (auto loans and leases, credit cards, student loans, consumer loans, residential mortgages, home equity loans, equipment leases, litigation settlements, insurance policies, and intellectual property), collateralized loan obligations, cross-border leasing transactions, project finance, defeasance transactions, royalty trusts, liquidation trusts, voting trusts, private equity funds, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds.
Ms. Damon is consistently praised by clients and peers and has been described as “terrific” and “experienced, careful, smart, and very personable” by Chambers USA. In 2021 alone, she was named among the Philadelphia Business Journal’s Diversity Leaders in Business, the News Journal’s Most Influential Delawareans, Savoy Magazine’s Most Influential Black Lawyers, and a Women, Influence & Power in Law Managing Partner of the Year.
Education
Recognition and Honors
Bar Admissions
