Laura L. Bilas

Practice Areas

Laura L. Bilas is a partner and business lawyer with Foley & Lardner LLP. She is the chair of the firm’s Finance and Public Finance Practices and focuses her practice on public finance, health care finance and structured lending matters. Laura’s experience includes serving as bond counsel, borrower’s counsel, underwriter’s counsel, disclosure counsel and credit enhancement provider’s counsel for numerous public finance and other structured transactions, including general obligation, special service area, special assessment, tax increment, multi-family housing, healthcare and industrial development financings. She is a member of the firm’s Finance & Financial Institutions; Healthcare Finance and Public Finance Practices; The Healthcare and Energy & Infrastructure Industry Teams; as well as the Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) Team.

Laura’s practice includes service as bond counsel, borrower’s counsel, underwriter’s counsel and credit enhancement provider’s counsel for 501(c)(3) financings, including financings for healthcare, cultural, educational and assisted living institutions.

Laura has served as bond counsel, underwriter’s counsel, disclosure counsel and issuer’s counsel to the Illinois Housing Development Authority, other state and local housing authorities and to lending institutions on housing financings, aggregating in excess of $1 billion. She also represents developers, lenders and other market participants on PACE (property assessed clean energy) financings.

Laura represents lenders and investment banking firms in connection with securitizations of municipal debt and the private placement of senior and subordinate debt instruments. She has also served as senior lenders’ counsel, credit enhancer’s and liquidity provider’s counsel for over 300 financings for domestic and foreign bank clients.

Career

Selected by her peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America© in the fields of: Public Finance Law (2015-2024) and Eminent Domain and Condemnation Law (2010-2014)

Recognized in Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business – Public Finance (2023 – 2025)

Named the Best Lawyers® Public Finance Law “Lawyer of the Year” in Chicago (2021)

Selected for inclusion by Illinois Super Lawyers® in Bonds and Government Finance (2012 – 2021)

Peer Review Rated as AV Preeminent®, the highest performance rating in the Martindale-Hubbell® Peer Review Ratings™ system