Noted attorney Richard Levin, who helped draft U.S. bankruptcy law as an assistant counsel to a committee in the US House of Representatives and who jump-started Cravath Swaine & Moore’s restructuring practice upon joining the firm from Skadden in 2007, has changed firms again. Levin has moved over to the Manhattan offices of Jenner & Block, where he is a partner.
Levin is renowned in the legal industry for work from the 1970s to the present that has helped shape much of the legal restructuring practice in the United States. He became an assistant counsel to the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary in 1975. In that role, Levin provided input on the drafting of the 1978 Bankruptcy Code. He made a transition to the now-defunct boutique firm of Stutman Treister & Glatt in 1978 and practiced law there until joining the Whittaker Corporation as general counsel and chief financial officer in 1994. In 1997, Levin moved to Skadden, where he remained until his move to Cravath ten years later.
“As I approached Cravath’s mandatory retirement age, I considered what I wanted to do next in my career and knew I wanted to continue to practice. Jenner & Block’s geographical model is an advantage for my practice because it provides broader reach, with offices in the major financial centers and government centers,” Levin told IFLR1000.
Levin reflected on the outcome of one of the highest-profile and most complex restructurings in recent memory – the effort to steer Detroit out of bankruptcy, and to satisfy the city’s bondholders without auctioning off the irreplaceable artworks housed in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
“My contribution to help preserve Detroit’s art was to provide insight as to how Chapter 9 operates and show where the risks were, which were not where they had originally thought them to be. This changed their positioning for the negotiations,” Levin recalled. “Then we started to look at the underlying facts in the law. We recognized that we had a tough challenge ahead us, but by the time we and Honigman finished all the factual and legal research, we came away feeling it would be very difficult for the judge to rule against the Detroit Institute of Arts even if the risks came to pass.”