Bankruptcy: Steven Karotkin, Weil, Gotshal
When Stephen Karotkin began working on General Motors Corporation’s bankruptcy filing, the Weil, Gotshal & Manges partner’s task looked impossible: Move GM—the world’s second-largest automaker at the time, with $91 billion in assets, in and out of bankruptcy court in just a little more than one month. “A critical element of the process was to minimize the amount of time that the enterprise was in Chapter 11,” Karotkin says. “The concern was, would people [continue] to buy automobiles from a company that was in Chapter 11?” Lawrence Buonomo, a GM in-house lawyer who was closely involved with the filing, puts it another way: “Bankruptcy was just not well-suited to our industry.”
