EDWIN E. SMITH, Esq.

Edwin E. Smith is a Partner in the Boston, Massachusetts, office of Bingham McCutchen LLP where he chairs the firm's Finance Area. Since joining the firm in 1974, he has concentrated his practice in general corporate and commercial law, debt financings, structured financings, workouts, bankruptcies and international transactions. Prior to being named a partner in 1981, Mr. Smith spent three and a half years in the firm's London offices where he concentrated in international financing and commercial transactions. He is member of the teaching faculty at the Morin Center for Banking Law Studies at Boston University Law School where he has taught secured transactions and teaches transnational lending and trade finance, and at Suffolk Law School where he currently teaches secured transactions. He also served in 1988, 1989 and 1994 as a Lecturer in Secured Transactions on the faculty of Harvard Law School. As a Uniform Law Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he has served as a member of the drafting committees for the 1995 revisions of Article 5 (letters of credit) and the 1999 revisions of Article 9 (secured transactions) of the Uniform Commercial Code and as the chair of the drafting committee that formulated the 2002 amendments to Articles 3 (negotiable instruments) and 4 (bank deposits and collections) of the Uniform Commercial Code. Mr. Smith is a past Chair of the Uniform Commercial Code Committee of the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association, is a member of the Council of the Business Law Section, for which he chairs the Council Committee on Strategic Planning, and is the current American Bar Association Advisor/Liaison to the Permanent Editorial Board of the Uniform Commercial Code. He also served as a U.S. delegate on the United Nations Convention on the Assignment of Receivables in International Trade and currently serves as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) working group on creating a secured transactions guide for legislation in United Nations member countries. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the National Bankruptcy Conference and is the immediate past President of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers. He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School.