Admitted to Practice in All State and Federal Courts

Coston & Rademacher can meet your legal needs including litigation, replevins, bankruptcies, franchise-financing litigation, transaction negotiations and documentation, workouts and restructring, general corporate representation, and new-corporation/LLC formation and filing.

Real Estate Transactional and closings, individual and commercial
Mortgage Foreclosures, commercial and consumer
Retail/Consumer collections

Our Attorneys

James E. Coston

Mr. Coston, the firm's Chairman, is a nationally recognized lease-finance attorney who has successfully litigated cases on behalf of equipment lessors in state and federal trial and appellate courts throughout the United States and has represented lenders and lessors in over $2 billion in equipment loans and finance transactions.

Born in 1955, Mr. Coston was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern University in 1977 and his Juris Doctor degree from the DePaul University College of Law in 1980. He has earned admission to the Illinois State Bar, the United States District Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and the Federal Trial Bar.

Mr. Coston has practiced lease-finance law exclusively for private law firms since 1982. He opened Chicago and Dallas offices for a predecessor California-based law firm before starting his own lease-law practice. He is also a frequent lecturer and instructor on equipment leasing law and business issues.

Mr. Coston serves on the Commercial Finance Law Committee of the Chicago Bar Association, and is a member of the Illinois State Bar Association and the Commercial Law League of America. He also serves on the Equipment Leasing Subcommittee of the American Bar Association and its Task Force on revisions to U.C.C. Article 2A. Mr. Coston is an active member of the Equipment Leasing Association of America (ELA), now known as the Equipment Leasing & Finance Association (ELFA), and has served for three years on its Legal Committee. He has also served as Chairman of the Illinois Region of the United Association of Equipment Leasing (UAEL), its Legal Committee, and its 1997 Legal Workshop. In 1998, he was elected to the UAEL Board of Directors, and in 2003-04 was the first attorney to become UAEL President.

Parallel to his work as a leasing attorney, Mr. Coston is a nationally recognized advocate for, and developer of, improved railroad passenger service in the United States. In 2000 Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, where he served until the Council's statutory expiration in 2003. In 2004, Mr. Coston founded Corridor Capital LLC to provide lease-financing options to passenger-rail operating agencies seeking to acquire rolling stock fleets and maintenance facilities. A native of Chicago, Mr. Coston resides on the city's North Side with his wife, Patricia E. Rademacher, and three sons, Jay, Alex and William.

Patricia E. Rademacher

Ms. Rademacher is the managing partner of the Chicago office and serves as general counsel to numerous leasing companies.

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ms. Rademacher was graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in business from Michigan State University and earned her Juris Doctor degree with honors from the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. She began her legal career with Coston, Lande & Sapir. Her practice is concentrated in several areas: commercial litigation (including numerous matters involving millions of dollars in damages due to fraudlulent transactions alleged against several high-profile defendants); bankruptcy matters, including defense-of-adversary claims seeking millions of dollars for alleged prefence payments and/or recharacterization of leases; equipment-finance documentation; franchise financing litigation; healthcare litigation and bankrupcty; and workouts and restructurings. Ms. Rademacher is admitted to the Illinois State Bar; the Michigan State Bar; the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the Federal Trial Bar, the Federal Bars for the Northern, Southern and Central Districts of Illinois; the Eastern and Western Districts of Michigan; the Northern and Southern Districts of Indiana; the Northern and Southern Districts of Wisconsin; and the Northern and Southern Districts of Ohio. She is an active member of the United Association of Equipment Lessors (UAEL), the Equipment Leasing & Finance Association (ELFA, formerly the Equipment Leasing Association [ELA]) as well as the Commercial Finance and Bankruptcy Law Committees of the Chicago Bar Association.

Ms. Rademacher served on a United Association of Equipment Leasing task force that drafted a code of ethics and regulations for lessors, vendors, lessees which became a part of the UAEL membership requirements.

Maysoun B. Iqal

A native of the Milwaukee suburb of Greendale, Ms. Iqal was educated in Madison and received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1997. She received her Juris Doctor degree from the Michigan State University College of Law in 2000, and in 2004 she was awarded a Masters of Taxation degree by Georgia State University.

After completing her degree Ms. Iqal began representing creditors in consumer bankruptcy cases in the state of Georgia. She also did indigent and pro bono defense work in both criminal and civil matters for residents in Clayton and Gwinnett Counties in Georgia. She spent five years with an Atlanta law firm, becoming a partner after two years and representing large creditors such as Citibank, Chase Bank and Wells Fargo in bankruptcy proceedings. Following the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 she won several important cases which clarified creditor's rights under the new law and enabled her clients to collect substantially increased sums from otherwise bankrupt individuals. During the same period, Ms. Iqal was a member of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, where she led discussions on bankruptcy topics at member workshops and served as interim vice president of the American Bar Association's Bankruptcy Group.

Since her arrival at Coston & Rademacher in Chicago in 2007, Ms. Iqal has handled a broad caseload of commercial litigation, commercial foreclosures and replevin matters in addition to her previous bankruptcy work and successful representation of creditor's interests in all varieties of complex claims and controversies. Ms. Iqal is currently admitted to the State Bars of Georgia and Illinois and all Federal Districts in both states. She is also a current and active member of the United Association of Equipment Lessors (UAEL), the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association (ELFA) and the Illinois State Bar Association (ISBA).

Nicholas J. Ronconi

A native of Queens, N.Y., Mr. Ronconi came to Chicago after graduation from high school in 1986 and worked at the Chicago Board of Trade, moving up from ring clerk to client representative for a firm in which he was a partner. In 1997 he was awarded a B.A. in political science by DePaul University. Returning to New York, he spent two years in the options-trading business at the New York Board of Trade, using technical analysis to advise clients on market trends and directions. He received his Juris Doctor degree from the Villanova University School of Law in Villanova, PA in 2003 and in 2004 undertook a series of contract assignments for the Chicago law firms of Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood; Latham & Watkins LLP; Freeborn & Peters LLP; and Kirkland & Ellis LLP; and the New York firms of Bois, Schiller & Flexner LLP, and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. These assignments included on-line document discovery and review covering securities and SEC litigation, product liability, bankruptcy, corporate misrepresentation, fraudulent accounting practices, mergers and aquisitions, anti-competitive practices, price fixing and pricing practices. Mr. Ronconi became skilled in document-review tools that included Concordance, Summation, Steelpoint, Stratify, Kroll and Applied discovery. From March 2005 to March 2006 Mr. Ronconi served as assistant corporate counsel to the Russia-based Aquaphor Corporation, traveling several times to Russia to draft a stock-placement agreement enabling this water-filter manufacturer to sell its shares in the U.S. and bring its corporate structure, organization and business practices into alignment with U.S. law.

Member of The General Bar and the Columbia Law List
Coston & Rademacher, through its network of local counsel, can administer nationwide portfolios of collection/litigation accounts. We can set up specific fee structures to meet each client's needs.