Maria Aguilar-Rocha is an associate in Morrison Foerster’s Washington, D.C. office and a member of the Financial Services Group.

Maria advises traditional financial services firms and financial technology companies on complex securities, derivatives, and digital asset regulatory, transactional, enforcement, and compliance matters. She leverages her prior experience as a senior financial regulator and deep knowledge of the Commodity Exchange Act, federal securities laws, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), National Futures Association (NFA), and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) rules and regulations to provide clients with solutions strategically designed to meet their objectives. Maria advises clients on a broad range of matters, including launches of innovative products and trading platforms, registration applications for traditional and vertically-integrated market structures, prediction markets and event contract regulation, and compliance with intermediary, market, and clearing rules and regulations.

Prior to joining Morrison Foerster, Maria served as Senior Counsel to a CFTC Commissioner and as Special Counsel in the CFTC’s Market Participants Division, where she advised on innovative market structure legislation, registration applications for designated contract markets, derivatives clearing organizations, futures commission merchants, and other market participants, rulemakings on event contracts and other prominent issues, enforcement actions in the digital asset and decentralized finance space, and no-action relief from several of the CFTC’s rules and regulations. She also practiced at two other international law firms, where she advised multinational companies on financial and environmental compliance issues; worked in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, Fraud Section, Securities and Financial Fraud Unit, where she handled large-scale, high-profile investigations and prosecutions of financial firms; and clerked for a federal judge at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where she managed complex securities class actions, commercial disputes, and other business matters.

Maria received her J.D. and LL.M., with distinction, in Securities and Financial Regulation from Georgetown University Law Center, where she served as Chair of the Diversity Committee and Articles and Notes Advisor on the Georgetown Journal of International Law and as Editor on the Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives. She was also a fintech fellow in the law school’s premier Institute of International Economic Law. She received her B.A., cum laude, from the University of California, Los Angeles.