Star Bankruptcy Lawyer James Sprayregen Leaves Kirkland & Ellis for Paul Weiss

The Quick Take

• Prominent bankruptcy and restructuring lawyer James Sprayregen, who helped build Kirkland & Ellis into a restructuring powerhouse, is joining Paul Weiss.
• The move represents a significant talent shift in the elite bankruptcy and restructuring advisory market.
• Paul Weiss is expanding its restructuring practice at a time of elevated corporate distress globally.

James Sprayregen, one of the most recognized names in US bankruptcy and corporate restructuring law, is departing Kirkland & Ellis — where he was a primary architect of its dominant restructuring practice — for Paul Weiss, the Financial Times reports. In the restructuring advisory market, the movement of marquee talent of Sprayregen's caliber is a significant competitive event, as sophisticated distressed debt investors and creditor committees retain restructuring counsel based heavily on individual attorney relationships and case records. Kirkland's restructuring practice has been the defining benchmark in the market for decades, and Sprayregen's departure represents both a reputational shift for Kirkland and an immediate credential upgrade for Paul Weiss.

Paul Weiss's restructuring capacity expansion comes at a timely moment in the credit cycle: elevated interest rates since 2022 have compressed corporate balance sheets globally, and the wave of covenant violations, maturity wall refinancings, and out-of-court restructurings that characterized 2024-2025 has created sustained demand for top-tier restructuring advisory. For distressed debt funds and special situations investors — including Oaktree, Apollo, and Baupost — the counsel they retain for complex restructurings is a direct input to their investment return outcomes, making Sprayregen's availability at Paul Weiss a potentially material factor in future mandate allocation.

The key signal to monitor is the flow of new restructuring mandates to Paul Weiss in the next six to twelve months, which will reveal whether Sprayregen's client relationships follow him from Kirkland. Any high-profile bankruptcy filing by a major corporate debtor that names Paul Weiss as restructuring counsel would be a direct confirmation of the talent move's commercial impact. The macro variable is the global interest rate trajectory: a sustained high-rate environment maintains the elevated corporate distress pipeline that makes restructuring advisory demand both cyclically persistent and strategically valuable for any law firm aiming to compete in the space.

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