Martin Bienenstock, one of the nation’s most well-known bankruptcy lawyers and the partner who led Weil Gotshal’s representation of Enron in its 2001 Chapter 11 filing, will head the business solutions and governance group for Dewey & LeBoeuf and also serve on the firm’s executive committee.
Bienenstock is the first high-profile partner to be recruited by Dewey & LeBoeuf, the product of the recent merger between
He will be joined at his new firm by Weil Gotshal bankruptcy partner Judy Liu and associate Timothy Karcher, who is joining Dewey & LeBoeuf as a partner.
Bingham McCutchen London head James Roome said: “This is a very significant move. Marty is a prominent and senior member of the
The loss of Bienenstock follows the departure in March of four prominent Weil Gotshal bankruptcy partners to Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft. However, Weil Gotshal chairman Stephen Dannhauser on Thursday (29 November) denied that the firm was losing ground in the bankruptcy arena, where the firm has generally been regarded as pre-eminent.
“As other firms try to build practices, they are always going to look at the firm that wrote the playbook,” he said.
Dannhauser said the parting with Bienenstock was amicable and pointed out that the firm still had 23 partners in its bankruptcy group, including stars such as Marcia Goldstein, who will become sole chair of the practice, and Jeffrey Tanenbaum and Harvey Miller, the former practice chair who returned to the firm earlier this year after a stint at an investment banking boutique.
A version of this article appeared in the New York Law Journal, a