There are hardly any bankruptcy lawyers in Nashville under the age of 40.
With three law schools in the Middle Tennessee area, you’d think there’d be more than enough lawyers in Nashville to satisfy any and every conceivable legal need.
If so, you’d be wrong. In my recent experience, Nashville is an under-lawyered city, if you judge from the number of new calls I get (across the legal spectrum) and, as result, the difficulty I have finding a lawyer to refer these callers to.
(As an aside, it might just be that the clients are calling their old lawyers at their new firms and are stunned by the new hourly rates.)
Having said that, I’m really concerned about the lack of young bankruptcy attorneys.
I wrote about this 2020–“The Bankruptcies are Coming, but Where are the Bankruptcy Attorneys“–and my bold March 2020 and April 2020 prediction about the looming wave of bankruptcy filings was totally wrong. In fact, the opposite was true: Bankruptcy filings in Middle Tennessee hit a historic low mark during that time.
As the country braces itself for an economic dip and you hear about law firm layoffs, I repeat my old advice: Learn Bankruptcy.
A bankruptcy practice is one of the best kept secrets in the profession. It’s all based on the Bankruptcy Code, which you can read cover-to-cover in an afternoon. It’s a small, collegial and sophisticated bar (the fact that it’s so small tends to prevent the shenanigans lawyers pull in the broader legal universe).
Plus, starting in a bankruptcy practice exposes you to nearly every legal issue imaginable, since so many state and federal law issues end up in bankruptcy court. Many complex transaction lawyers cut their teeth doing 363 sales in bankruptcy court.
During the last recession, Nashville was lucky and recovered quickly, with real estate prices rising, corporate growth, and a robust commercial lending base in the immediate years after the downturn.
The downside of that is that we’ve lost a generation of bankruptcy lawyers to corporate, commercial lending, and other (more sexy) practice areas. Today, in the year 2023, the lawyers who file debtor bankruptcies are largely the same ones who were filing those cases fifteen years ago. You can count the firms who file small/medium corporate chapter 11 cases on one hand.
I expect to see more national and local bankruptcy filings in 2024. If you’re a law student or recent grad trying to differentiate yourself from the pack, learning a little bit about bankruptcy law may be a smart move.
Creditors Rights 101 