Runaway Trains
May 21, 2007, The Deal

White & Case was ranked first in The Deal's end-of-year bankruptcy league tables for 2006.  With 516 active cases, White & Case was  ahead of the second-placed firm by nearly 88 percent.  The article attributes the volume of work that White & Case brought in during the year to foreword thinking and a global strategy.

"Partners during 1979 and 1980 had to forgo profits to build out an international network," says Evan Hollander, a partner in White & Case's New York office. "It took people building for the future.”

The majority of the Firm's bankruptcy work in 2006 came from Germany.  Düsseldorf-based partner Biner Bähr was named among the top individual bankruptcy lawyers worldwide, ranking second overall with 257 active assignments.  Hamburg partner Sven-Holger Undritz was also featured in the leading lawyers list. 

In Germany, a judge can appoint an insolvency administrator for a case, and Bähr says a judge will often call him and ask whether he's free.  Undritz notes that the company can ask for a different insolvency administrator, but they generally do not.
 
"This is completely different from other countries," Bähr says.  "Of course, we cannot work on every order personally, but we have a big staff here.”  He estimates about 10 individuals work on each matter, since White & Case has 22 insolvency lawyers in Germany and 120 employees in five offices.