Our annual Corporate Scorecard ranks firms according to the amount of transactional work they handled in nine key areas–although in 2009′s sluggish economy, the real story was how little work firms did. M&A work was off 34 percent from an already-difficult 2008, and the volume of asset-backed securities work fell by 88 percent. The exception was bankruptcy: Forty-two firms with assets of $1 billion or more filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2009, a jump of 40 percent from 2008. Four of 2009’s filings–those of General Motors, Chrysler, CIT, and Thornburg Mortgage–were among the ten largest public company filings ever.