Legal News

Jones Day?s Corinne Ball is ?Dealing With the World?

By Ashby Jones

If you can't make a go of it in bankruptcy in this market, it's time to dust off that application to dental school. — Aric Press, editor-in-chief of the American Lawyer, April 28, 2009.

Well, it’s become fairly clear that Harvey Miller and his merry band of bankruptcy lawyers at Weil Gotshal aren’t going to be administering injections of Novacaine anytime soon. And we can bet that neither will Corinne Ball, co-head of the restructuring practice at Jones Day (and a Weil Gotshal alumna herself). For months, Ball has been working behind the scenes on the restructuring of Chrysler LLC and going forward, with the car-maker’s bankruptcy filing reportedly expected later today, she’s likely to play an even larger role in the fate of the company.

This Reuters story from Wednesday gets into who Ball is (charismatic, hard-working) and the Herculean job she’s got in front of her. The money quote comes from Albert Togut of Togut, Segal & Segal, who writes:

“There’s a lot going on here that you don’t have in a normal bankruptcy case — political considerations, labor unions concerned about precedent, virtually every community in the country impacted by a meltdown. . . She’s dealing with the world.”

LB Personal Anecdote of the Day: Whenever things in our life get really lousy, we’re inclined to think back to two days we spent at the Washington, D.C., office of what was then called Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in the fall of 1992. We were fresh out of college and could barely brush our teeth let alone do anything of any usefulness in a real office, yet, through a temp agency, we were summoned to the Jones Day offices, where we were seated in a dimly lit conference room and asked to count sheets of paper for eight hours and scratch down our tally on a legal pad. That’s it. Just count pieces of paper. Two days, eight hours a day. And yet, a year later, we were off to law school. Go figure.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 30, 2009 (boomark / email).