• Weil shaped modern bankruptcy practice, advised on landmark cases like Lehman Brothers 
• Firm’s largest engagements included First Brands Group, Steward Health Care System, and Sears Holdings 
• Average hourly billing rate doubled between 2016 and 2025, despite declining engagements 

Weil, Gotshal & Manges, the 95-year-old law firm that helped establish restructuring as a major corporate legal practice, has elected to wind down following a sustained loss of prominent partners, a steep drop in new mandates, leadership uncertainty and the collapse of merger discussions with Willkie Farr & Gallagher. The firm’s restructuring engagements tracked by Debtwire fell from 30 in 2020 to seven in 2025 and just three so far this year, with none as debtors’ counsel. The move closes a long chapter for a firm whose lawyers helped shape modern bankruptcy practice and advised on some of the most significant cases in US history, including Lehman Brothers, General Motors, Enron and Texaco.

Weil’s historic role in restructuring and bankruptcy

Any account of Weil’s restructuring legacy begins with Harvey Miller, who is regarded by many as one of the most influential, if not founding, architects of modern US corporate restructuring and Chapter 11 practice. Martin Bienenstock joined Weil in the 1970s and worked alongside Miller and the duo grew the firm into one of – if not the – leading debtor-side restructuring practices. Bienenstock eventually succeeded Miller as chair of Weil’s corporate finance and restructuring group. The restructuring group Miller built at Weil is considered to have laid the foundation for making corporate restructuring a common practice group in most top tier law firms.

Less than a decade after joining Weil, Miller helped shape the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, which replaced the Bankruptcy Act of 1898 and created the modern Bankruptcy Code. Weil went on to represent many of the era’s most prominent debtors, influencing how courts construed the Code in landmark cases including Texaco, R.H. Macy & Co, Enron, WorldCom, Bethlehem Steel, Global Crossing and Lehman Brothers. In Macy’s, the firm helped test how section 365 applies to commercial leases and a debtor’s obligation to pay rent. That history may now resurface: Weil’s lease at the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue, one of the world’s most coveted office addresses, is likely to be a significant issue in its winddown.

Other prominent restructuring attorneys who at one point worked at Weil include Corinne Ball and Marcia Goldstein, two of the leading female restructuring attorneys of their time, as well as Christopher Lopez and Alfredo Perez, who spent the formative years of their careers in Weil’s restructuring group before joining the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas.

The value of a firm largely lies in its attorneys and the business they generate. The recent mass exodus of high-profile partners and failed merger talks with Willkie Farr & Gallagher are largely responsible for the firm’s decline and ultimate decision to wind down its business, a notable loss for those who worked with or against its attorneys and later appeared before some of them once they took the bench.

Weil’s share of large Chapter 11 cases

Debtwire’s Restructuring Database (RDB), which tracks Chapter 11 cases involving USD 10m or more in funded debt as well as other noteworthy cases, shows a substantial decline in Weil’s position among debtors’ counsel over the past decade. The number of Chapter 11 cases involving at least USD 100m of funded debt rose from 24 cases in 2016 to a peak of 65 in 2020, before plunging to just 16 in 2021. Filings recovered to 29 in 2023, only to decline again to 24 in 2024, 23 in 2025 and 14 cases year to date.

Among the three elite restructuring firms, Kirkland & Ellis generally held the largest share of large cases, while Latham & Watkins expanded its position in portions of the period. Weil, by contrast, remained in the low single digits for most of the period before falling to zero in 2026, suggesting its decline began before the latest partner departures.

Weil’s largest debtors’ counsel engagements

Between 1 January 2016 and the year-to-date 2026 period covered by the data, Weil’s largest in-court debtors’ counsel engagement by total fees was First Brands Group. The firm billed USD 163.29m for approximately 107,988.60 hours of work, resulting in a blended hourly rate[1] of USD 1,512.07. The case was subsequently converted to Chapter 7.

Steward Health Care System ranked second, with USD 117.58m in fees for approximately 88,663 hours of work and a blended hourly rate of USD 1,326.15. Weil’s next largest engagements were Sears Holdings, at USD 85.02m, and Westinghouse Electric, at USD 57.04m. The top 10 also included SAS AB, PG&E, Talen Energy Supply, Speedcast International, TPI Composites and Fieldwood Energy.

The table illustrates the scale and breadth of Weil’s historical restructuring practice. Its 10 largest matters collectively included major healthcare, retail, energy, utility, aviation, as well as telecommunications restructurings. These cases were filed across the Southern District of Texas, Southern District of New York and Northern District of California. Nine of the 10 cases resulted in confirmed plans, while First Brands, a highly contested case involving purported fraud and misappropriated funds, was ultimately converted to Chapter 7.

Weil’s average hourly billing rate

Weil’s blended hourly billing rate rose every year shown in the data, nearly doubling between 2016 and 2025. The average blended rate increased from USD 794.27 for cases filed in 2016 to USD 968.76 in 2020, before rising more sharply to USD 1,147.84 in 2021. It subsequently increased to USD 1,186.55 in 2022, USD 1,209.81 in 2023 and USD 1,338.54 in 2024.

For cases filed in 2025, Weil’s blended hourly rate reached USD 1,530.29, which is approximately 93% above its 2016 level and 14% above the 2024 average. The increase was consistent with broader growth in large law firm billing rates, but it also reflected the seniority and complexity of the work performed in Weil’s large, in-court restructuring matters.

A practice spanning restructuring constituencies

While Weil has historically been best known for its work as Chapter 11 debtors’ counsel, the expanded data shows a restructuring practice that was nearly evenly divided between debtor and nondebtor representations. Of the 160 Weil engagements tracked by the RDB from 2016 through 2026, 79 were debtor representations, while 81 involved other constituencies.

Outside of debtor work in Chapter 11 cases, Weil most frequently represented ad hoc groups, with 19 engagements over the period, followed by DIP lenders with 14. The firm also represented equity holders in 10 matters, administrative agents in nine, bidders in seven and bondholders in six.

The data also shows a marked decline in Weil’s overall restructuring activity following a peak in 2020. The firm recorded 30 engagements that year, including 17 debtor representations, before falling to 14 engagements in 2021 and 11 in 2022. Activity increased to 12 engagements in 2023 and 15 in 2024 only to fall to seven in 2025 and three so far this year. None of the three 2026 in-court engagements were debtors’ counsel, although one involved a DIP financing lender, while two fell within the “other” category.

The lookback to 2016 provides a more nuanced picture of Weil’s restructuring practice than the 2020 through 2024 period examined in Debtwire’s prior advisor report. Although debtors’ counsel was by far Weil’s largest individual role, nondebtor representations collectively accounted for slightly more than half of the firm’s engagements during the 2016 through 2026 period.

Weil’s role in out-of-court restructuring

Weil’s diminished role extended to out-of-court restructurings, including liability management exercises (LMEs), which have increasingly taken the place of Chapter 11 filings for distressed companies.[2]

Weil was lead counsel in just one of the 93 out of court mandates tracked by the RDB during the first eight months of 2026, tying it with six other firms at the bottom of the table. Gibson Dunn & Crutcher led with 27 mandates, followed by Latham & Watkins with 12 and Kirkland & Ellis with eight. The figures suggest that Weil had not established a strong position in this market, which has absorbed a growing share of restructuring work that once would have gone through bankruptcy court.

What Weil leaves behind

The data shows a firm that continued to command premium rates and win complex, high-fee mandates even as its share of large Chapter 11 cases shrank and its overall engagements fell. Weil’s billing rates rose every year through 2025, and two of its three largest debtor engagements by fees, First Brands and Steward Health Care, were filed in 2024 and 2025. But those marquee matters could not offset a thinning bench of senior restructuring partners, a limited presence in the growing out-of-court market and the failure of merger talks with Willkie.

Weil’s decision to retain Davis Polk restructuring lawyers to guide its own wind down is an unusual turn for a firm that spent more than five decades steering companies through financial distress. Its legacy will continue through the case law it helped develop, the practice model it pioneered and the lawyers it trained, including two who now preside over some of the country’s most complex Chapter 11 cases.

[1] A blended hourly rate is a single average rate that a law firm charges for a matter, calculated by combining the different hourly rates of all professionals and paraprofessionals into one number.

[2] Debtwire does not accept confidential mandates for out-of-court restructuring or liability management exercises. Accordingly, the figures may understate firms’ out-of-court activity.