Greenberg Traurig office. (Photo: J. Albert Diaz/ALM)

Greenberg Traurig has bolstered its bankruptcy practice by linking back up with restructuring partner Bruce Zirinsky, as the spread of the novel coronavirus continues to roil markets.

Zirinsky was the head of Greenberg's restructuring practice until he set out on his own to form Zirinsky Law Partners in 2015. The pick up isn't a traditional lateral: Zirinksy and his firm have joined Greenberg's 75-attorney bankruptcy practice as part of an "exclusive strategic alliance," wherein the two firms will work on future matters together as they arise.

Firm chairman Richard Rosenbaum said that, for confidential reasons, Zirinksy cannot immediately join the firm, and he was noncommittal as to whether Zirinsky will ever fully rejoin the firm. Zirinsky is based in New York and will work closely with a partner in Miami, Rosenbaum said.

The rising din of questions and requests from firm clients in the airline, hotel and real estate industries—areas where Zirinsky has extensive experience—convinced Rosenbaum to call his former colleague in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. As a former partner who still worked with Greenberg from time to time, there was little due diligence to do, he said. Rosenbaum figured it would be best to bring Zirinsky's expertise in now and figure out the logistics later, rather than sacrifice crucial months, he said.

"We didn't want to say 'let's wait six months, a year, for everything to be perfect,'" Rosenbaum said. "To bring Bruce Zirinsky into the room is going to be additive. Rather than wait for perfection in a crisis time like this, we went the route of strategic alliance."

Bruce R. Zirinsky. (Courtesy photo)

Zirinksy has twice been dubbed one of The American Lawyer's dealmakers of the year. In the midst of the last financial crisis, Zirinsky and his team at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, led the blockbuster Chapter 11 proceedings for Northwest Airlines. In 2018, he won the dealmaker distinction again for the work he and Hughes Hubbard & Reed partner Christopher Kiplok did on the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Republic Airlines.

Zirinsky joins just a week after the firm announced that it lured away Ian Jack, a two-decade restructuring veteran at Baker McKenzie and former global co-head of its bankruptcy practice.

Rosenbaum said the firm had been preparing for a recession and looking to bolster its restructuring team even before the spread of COVID-19 started to affect the markets, although he and the firm did not expect any eventual downturn to be driven by a global pandemic.

Despite the record $2 trillion stimulus package set to pass through Congress by the end of this week, economists at Moody Analytics expect the second-quarter GDP to drop by 17% as businesses shutter under state-by-state shelter-in-place orders and closures. On Thursday, the federal government announced that a record 3.28 million Americans filed for unemployment last week.

For right now, many of Greenberg's large corporate clients are keeping the firm's restructuring attorneys busy crafting contingency plans, and the firm has seen little in the way of bankruptcy filings so far, Rosenbaum said.

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