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Laura Menninger
Laura A. Menninger
Law Enforcement & Legal
Person
LauraMenninger
Lawyer
CriminalDefense
GhislaineMaxwell
JeffreyEpstein
Denver
SouthernDistrictOfNewYork
Denver trial lawyer of Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, formerly a Goldman Sachs analyst and law clerk to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who defended Ghislaine Maxwell in Giuffre v. Maxwell and United States v. Maxwell. Denver, Colorado
type with role start fn
employed_by Haddon, Morgan and Foreman shareholder 2012 1
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employed_by Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison associate 1998 2002 1
type with role fn
employed_by Goldman Sachs financial analyst, Corporate Finance Department 1
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represented Ghislaine Maxwell defense counsel 2015 2022 2
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participant_in Giuffre v. Maxwell counsel for the defendant 2015-09-21 2
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participant_in United States v. Maxwell defense counsel 2020 8
2026-09-25 2026-10-15

Laura A. Menninger is an American trial lawyer, a shareholder of the Denver firm Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, who with her partner Jeffrey S. Pagliuca represented Ghislaine Maxwell in Virginia Giuffre's 2015 defamation suit, Giuffre v. Maxwell, and in the 2020 criminal prosecution United States v. Maxwell in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Before law school she was a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs; after it she clerked for Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the same court. In 2022 her firm sued Maxwell, her brother Kevin Maxwell and her husband Scott Borgerson for more than 878,000 dollars in unpaid fees.123

Education and Career

Menninger graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1991 and worked as a financial analyst in the Corporate Finance Department of Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York City. She took her J.D. with distinction from Stanford Law School in 1997, where she was an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review, and clerked for Kaplan in 1997 and 1998. She was a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York from 1998 to 2002, then moved to Colorado, where she spent five years as a trial lawyer with the Colorado State Public Defender before joining Holland & Hart. She joined Haddon, Morgan and Foreman as a shareholder in 2012. She is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and has chaired the Criminal Justice Act Standing Committee of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.1

Giuffre v. Maxwell

Giuffre filed her defamation complaint on September 21, 2015 before Judge Robert W. Sweet, represented by Sigrid McCawley and other lawyers of Boies Schiller Flexner; Maxwell was represented by Menninger and Pagliuca. Maxwell moved to dismiss and to stay discovery on December 1, 2015; Sweet denied the motion in February 2016, and on March 17, 2016 signed the protective order under which deposition transcripts and exhibits were filed under seal.2

In Giuffre's deposition of May 3, 2016, unsealed in part in December 2022, Menninger summarized her testimony and asked, over an objection to form by Giuffre's lawyer Bradley Edwards: "another prince, the large hotel chain owner and Marvin Minsky, is there anyone else that Ghislaine Maxwell directed you to go have sex with?" Giuffre answered: "I am definitely sure there is. But can I remember everybody's name? No." She testified that she had kept notes of the men's names and had burned them "in a bonfire when I lived at Titusville." The parties settled on May 24, 2017.45

United States v. Maxwell

A grand jury in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Maxwell under seal on June 29, 2020, and she was arrested on July 2, 2020.6 On August 24, 2020 Pagliuca told Judge Alison Nathan that the government had obtained by grand jury subpoena, from Giuffre's lawyers, nearly 90,000 pages of civil discovery still under the Giuffre v. Maxwell protective order, more than half of the 165,000 pages of criminal discovery, while the Second Circuit and Judge Loretta Preska were deciding whether to unseal the same material; if they ordered Maxwell's deposition unsealed "without the benefit of this information," he wrote, "the cat will be out of the bag."7

Maxwell's lead pretrial motion, filed over the signatures of Mark S. Cohen of Cohen & Gresser, Pagliuca and Menninger, and Bobbi Sternheim, sought dismissal for breach of the 2007 Epstein non-prosecution agreement, whose co-conspirator clause provided that "the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein." Nathan denied the motion with the other pretrial motions on April 16, 2021 (ECF No. 207). On November 1, 2021 Haddon, Morgan and Foreman served a defense expert disclosure concerning the memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus. Maxwell was convicted on December 29, 2021 and sentenced to twenty years; the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed on September 17, 2024, rejecting the non-prosecution agreement argument.689

The Fee Suit

On August 22, 2022 Haddon, Morgan and Foreman sued Maxwell, Kevin Maxwell and Borgerson in Denver, alleging that it had not been paid more than 878,000 dollars for defending her at trial and on appeal. The complaint alleged that Maxwell had put her brother in charge of paying her legal fees after her 2020 arrest, that he paid "a fraction" of what was billed through trial while urging the firm to keep working on appeal issues, that he blamed Borgerson for obstructing payment, and that Borgerson formed a limited liability company to buy real estate in order to shield his wife's assets from creditors. Menninger and Pagliuca were named as members of the trial team. In the Second Circuit appeals in the civil case, the opinions of July 3, 2019, October 19, 2020 and July 23, 2025 list Adam Mueller of the firm as counsel for Maxwell.10 Ian Maxwell said that no family member, including Ghislaine, would comment on the litigation.3

Footnotes

  1. Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, P.C., "Attorney Laura A. Menninger," firm biography (archived September 13, 2024). https://web.archive.org/web/20240913034618/https://www.hmflaw.com/attorney-laura-menninger/ ↩︎

  2. Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 1:15-cv-07433 (S.D.N.Y.), Complaint, ECF No. 1 (Sept. 21, 2015); Motion to Dismiss and to Stay Discovery, ECF Nos. 14, 15, 17 (Dec. 1, 2015); Opinion denying motion to dismiss, ECF No. 37 (Feb. 2016); Answer, ECF No. 54 (March 14, 2016); Protective Order, ECF No. 62 (March 17, 2016). https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4355835/ian-torrington-blatchford-as-interim-administrator-of-virginia-giuffres/ ↩︎

  3. Associated Press, "Ghislaine Maxwell's Lawyers Sue for Over $878K in Fees," NBC Los Angeles, August 24, 2022. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/national-international/ghislaine-maxwells-lawyers-sue-for-over-878k-in-fees/2971199/ ↩︎

  4. Deposition of Virginia Giuffre, May 3, 2016, transcript pp. 204 to 206, filed as Exhibit 3 (DE 514-3), Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 1:15-cv-07433-LAP (S.D.N.Y.), ECF No. 1295-4 (filed December 12, 2022). https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.447706/gov.uscourts.nysd.447706.1295.4.pdf ↩︎

  5. Giuffre v. Maxwell, No. 1:15-cv-07433 (S.D.N.Y.), Complaint, ECF No. 1 (Sept. 21, 2015); Protective Order, ECF No. 62 (March 2016); Order, ECF No. 1367 (Aug. 11, 2026). https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4355835/ian-torrington-blatchford-as-interim-administrator-of-virginia-giuffres/ ↩︎

  6. United States v. Maxwell, No. 22-1426-cr, slip op. at 3 to 4, 6 to 12, 23 to 25 (2d Cir. Sept. 17, 2024) (Cabranes, Wesley, Lohier, JJ.), reported at 118 F.4th 256. https://storage.courtlistener.com/pdf/2024/09/17/united_states_v._maxwell.pdf ↩︎

  7. U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library, EFTA00088205, DataSet 9, letter, Jeffrey S. Pagliuca, Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, P.C., to Hon. Alison J. Nathan, "Re: Reply in Support of Request to Modify Protective Order (Under Seal), United States v. Ghislaine Maxwell, 20 Cr. 330 (AJN)," August 24, 2020. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00088205.pdf ↩︎

  8. United States v. Maxwell, No. 1:20-cr-00330 (S.D.N.Y.), Notice of Motion to Dismiss Superseding Indictment for Breach of Non-Prosecution Agreement, ECF No. 141 (filed Feb. 4, 2021). https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.539612/gov.uscourts.nysd.539612.141.0.pdf ; Opinion and Order, ECF No. 207 (April 16, 2021). https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17318376/united-states-v-maxwell/ ↩︎

  9. U.S. Department of Justice, Epstein Library, EFTA00016268, DataSet 8, letter, Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, P.C., defense expert disclosure, United States v. Maxwell, 20 Cr. 330 (S.D.N.Y.), November 1, 2021 (duplicate at EFTA02835304, Court Records). https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA00016268.pdf ↩︎

  10. Brown v. Maxwell, 929 F.3d 41 (2d Cir. July 3, 2019), counsel block (Ty Gee and Adam Mueller, Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, for Maxwell), https://static.case.law/f3d/929/cases/0041-01.json ; Giuffre v. Maxwell, summary order, No. 20-2413-cv (2d Cir. Oct. 19, 2020), counsel for defendant-appellant: Adam Mueller (Ty Gee on the brief), Haddon, Morgan and Foreman, P.C.; Giuffre v. Maxwell, consolidated appeals decided July 23, 2025, counsel block (Adam Mueller, Haddon, Morgan & Foreman, P.C.). ↩︎