Bankruptcy has been a jumbled sandbox ever since shedding outsider status to make its way into the stable of acceptable mainstream practices at modern law firms. Long gone are the days when bankruptcy lawyers toiled in their arcane arenas, unknown and unrecognized except by association with a high-profile debtor case. At Duane Morris, we now regularly find ourselves in the midst of the most complex and contested disputes, transactions and financing deals in the country, and are providing services to some of our firm’s most sophisticated clients.

In that context, the Bankruptcy and Reorganization practice at Duane Morris has been assessing and redefining our position and role in the marketplace. Coinciding with this is a reevaluation of our communication with the market.

At our well-attended events in the past, we would typically showcase a panel of our lawyers discussing the cases that defined the insolvency scene over the previous year. But the more we looked at the marketplace and our leadership position within it, the clearer it became that while there is no shortage of academic legal writing and commentary in the field (and we turn out a lot of it), what our clients are increasingly interested in is how to monetize all that good thinking and analysis. The conclusion: What would be truly valuable is meaningful integration of our legal case experience with the interests of other leading practitioners in the space—and further, that even deeper insight would result from involvement by the investment community, along with the more traditional core practice functions of creditor, debtor, committee and trustee representations.

This strategy formed the genesis of our midyear 2013 event in New York City, designed to parlay our deep knowledge of the courts and case law with that of the turnaround, investing and forensic specialists from Alvarez & Marsal and CohnReznick. The observations were trenchant, the dialogue spirited and the issues that were brought to the table among the most vital and problematic of those we are facing today. We think it is part of our responsibility as one of the most active and visible bankruptcy and reorganization practices in the United States to contribute to thought leadership in this field. We hope you will find that this publication, the inaugural edition of our Optimize series in the restructuring and distressed credit industry, marks an important step toward that goal. We invite your questions and commentary.