James Giddens testifies during a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 13, 2011. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

Hughes Hubbard & Reed senior counsel James Giddens said this week that his decade-long work as trustee overseeing the liquidation of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s broker-dealer unit could be completed next year, marking an end to a decade-long odyssey that has generated roughly $400 million for Giddens' firm.

Giddens was appointed trustee on Sept. 19, 2008, to oversee the dissolution of the now-defunct financial services giant's brokerage unit under the oversight of the Securities Investor Protection Corp. In the decade since, his team has returned $115 billion to creditors and satisfied all but 381 of the roughly 140,000 claims made to the Lehman bankruptcy estate.

Lehman filed for Chapter 11 protection on Sept. 15, 2008, beginning the largest bankruptcy proceeding in U.S. history at a time when the global banking system faced its gravest crisis since The Great Depression. Weil, Gotshal & Manges grabbed the lead role on the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers' parent company, earning nearly $500 million in fees for its efforts.

As for Hughes Hubbard's work, the firm settled $106 billion worth of claims to Lehman's customer accounts.

One of the first moves Giddens made in managing the wind-down was to sell the busted bank's U.S. brokerage accounts, with a value of about $43 billion, to Barclays plc. A dispute over about $4 billion of the assets in that sale ultimately led to a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court filed by Giddens' team. The petition was denied, and a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in favor of Barclays was upheld.

General creditors, once expected to be nearly stiffed, have so far received nearly 40 cents on the dollar, Giddens wrote in a letter Monday detailing his progress to U.S. District Judge Shelley Chapman of the Southern District of New York. The matter used no taxpayer funds and no SIPC funds, which are made up of fees paid by member financial institutions.

“As a young associate in the late 1970's I helped write the SIPA statute and have represented SIPC and served as a trustee in many cases since that time,” Giddens wrote. “While the statute has evolved over the years, as indeed has the Bankruptcy Code, SIPA's core principles and all of its operative provisions remain the same. There is no doubt that Lehman was the single biggest test of the SIPA statute, and 10 years later even our harshest critics acknowledge that this test has become the statutes greatest success.”

Hughes Hubbard has submitted 26 applications for compensation during the matter totaling fee requests worth $397.3 million, according to court records. The firm has also requested compensation for $4.6 million in expenses. (As a matter of comparison, Baker & Hostetler partner Irving Picard has billed roughly $1 billion for his work as trustee for funds related to Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme.)

Hughes Hubbard's work has tapered off in recent years. From January through April 2018, the firm's fee request totaled $2.25 million. From 2009 through 2015, Hughes Hubbard filed 18 fee requests that averaged nearly $20 million. The firm's largest request, for $37 million, came in May 2013.

“This proceeding has been a success, but 10 years later the key lesson of Lehman remains that such a failure should be avoided altogether, for the benefit of all stakeholders,” Giddens wrote in a presentation filed in court this week. (Giddens, a former partner at Hughes Hubbard who remains chair of the firm's bankruptcy and corporate reorganization group, switched to a senior counsel role two years ago.)

The collapse of Lehman not only upended the Big Law world, despite generating years of work for bankruptcy litigators, but it also left the financial affairs of thousands of company employees and shareholders in shambles. One of those individuals, former Lehman in-house lawyer Charles Kwalwasser, spoke with CNBC about his experience.

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