Aaron Chastain likes the problems that don’t fit on one desk: the consumer finance program that has to work in 50 states at once, the litigation portfolio too large to manage case by case, the state attorney general investigation where the answer has to be both legally correct and something the business can actually implement. His clients are the companies that originate and service consumer loans — and, increasingly, the banks and funds whose capital is riding on those loans.
Much of that work is in residential solar. Aaron chairs Bradley’s Solar Consumer Finance team, representing the developers, lenders, servicers, and capital partners who finance rooftop systems — on both halves of the problem. He helps them build programs, disclosures, dealer agreements, and servicing practices that will survive contact with state and federal consumer credit law, and he defends those same programs when a borrower, a putative class, or a state attorney general decides to test them. Few consumer products attract scrutiny from as many directions at once: TILA and state lending statutes, UDAP and deceptive-marketing theories, installer and contractor conduct, licensing, assignee liability. Aaron has spent years learning where the pressure comes from, which is a useful thing to know before it arrives.
At multiple points in his career, Aaron has served as national litigation managing counsel, directing the overall litigation defense strategy for portfolios of several thousand active matters arising out of loan books carrying billions of dollars in unpaid principal balance. The work is less about any individual case than about the system around it — which matters get tried and which get resolved and on what terms, how a position taken in one jurisdiction holds up in the other 49, how a national caseload gets staffed, budgeted, and reported, and how a general counsel learns about the genuinely bad case early rather than later. Aaron also has negotiated with several offices of state attorneys general in investigative and enforcement actions, work that runs on much the same instinct: figure out what the other side actually needs and what your client can actually operationalize.
He asks clients to trust that judgment because he has done every part of the underlying work himself. Aaron has drafted the complaints and the answers, run large document productions and the analyses that made them mean something, taken and defended depositions where the transcript controlled the case, written the dispositive motions, selected juries, and served as lead counsel in multiple jury trials. He has briefed hundreds of appeals and argued dozens of them in state and federal courtrooms from Brooklyn to San Francisco. Alongside the litigation, he has spent thousands of hours on the compliance side, working through rules from the CFPB, FTC, OCC, HHS, and state banking departments with clients who need a plain-language answer rather than a memo.
Managing a portfolio at that scale also means reporting outward. Aaron has worked directly with (and at times, represented) the banks, funds, and warehouse lenders whose capital is exposed in the litigation he manages, on the questions those institutions actually ask: What is the realistic range of exposure, what ought to be reserved against it, what does pending litigation do to the value of the collateral, and what happens to the cases if servicing changes hands? He treats those as questions with numbers attached, because to the people asking them, they are.