Flag of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in front of Capitolio, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Litigators sometimes describe their most intense cases as “drinking from a fire hose.” But the $120 billion Puerto Rico debt restructuring—that's no fire hose. It's Niagara Falls.

Consider that as of yesterday, the docket for the lead case in Puerto Rico federal court has had 7,860 entries in the last 26 months. That's an average of 10 filings a day, 365 days a year. 

And that's not counting nearly 300 associated cases—by unsecured creditors, insurers, pensioners, bondholders, hedge funds, as well as actions to recover money that the commonwealth previously paid government contractors. There's a U.S. Supreme Court case set to be argued in October as well.

It's the docket that ate the Am Law 100—seriously, what firm doesn't have a piece of the action? We're talking Proskauer Rose; O'Melveny & Myers; Paul Hastings; Jenner & Block; Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Weil Gotshal; Milbank; Munger Tolles; Cadwalader; Jones Day; Brown Rudnick; White & Case; Skadden; Robbins Russell; Quinn Emanuel; Wachtell; Dechert … The list goes on. 

The latest skirmish flared up over the holiday weekend, pitting the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico—which was created by Congress to oversee the commonwealth's finances—and its counsel from Proskauer against the governor of Puerto Rico and his legal team from O'Melveny & Myers. 

It's one battle in a much larger war, but it provides a window into just how fast-moving and intense the litigation can be.

The Proskauer litigation team led by Timothy Mungovan and Martin Bienenstock on July 3 sued Governor Ricardo Antonio Rosselló Nevares and the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority, objecting to a series of new laws that would allegedly siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars from the oversight board's carefully crafted fiscal plan.

The board, they noted, was intended by Congress to be “an apolitical body to make hard and sometimes unpopular fiscal plan and budgetary decisions which commonwealth governments had not made.”

In other words, the board is the bad cop. But when you're saddled with “severe economic decline, operating deficits, lack of financial transparency, management inefficiencies and excessive borrowing,” someone has to make the tough calls to get things in order.

Except the Puerto Rico legislature and governor threw a wrench in the board's plans, enacting what's known as Law 29 on May 17. According to the board, the law essentially eliminates the obligation of Puerto Rico's municipalities to reimburse the commonwealth for their pension costs. It also exempts municipalities from paying their contribution to the commonwealth's health insurance program.

The legislation will allegedly cost the commonwealth about $311 million for fiscal year 2020, and $1.7 billion through fiscal year 2024—an obligation that the Proskauer team says undermines the board's whole purpose and mandate.

But the powers of the board are running up against Puerto Rico's sovereignty, and the right of democratically elected leaders to make spending decisions. In public remarks, the governor said the board's pension cuts “constitute[] an attack on everyone in Puerto Rico,” and suggested that the board “want[s] to go to the courts to run over the people of Puerto Rico, to usurp them.”

The case is before U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain in the Southern District of New York. On Sunday, she fast-tracked the motion for declaratory and injunctive relief, with oral arguments scheduled for Aug. 2.