A Bankruptcy Twopher

Two bits of bankruptcy stuff.

One: a Christmas party with some of my bankruptcy buds last night--these are the guys who do the business cases (where some actual money sloshes around) as distinct from the consumer cases (where people fight tooth and toenail over nothing).

They pretty much agreed that business is off. They don't actually complain--hey, they have some sense of perspective--but they all know it would be a more convivial party if (t0 paraphrase Dylan Thomas) lack of money would begin to roll in.

They figure business will come back. These things run in cycles and some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you. Where will the business come from? Well, housing, they say. Residential construction. Not here, of course, but in general. Also hedge funds, and just exactly how do simple, barefoot country bankruptcy lawyers get a piece of that?

I don't know how to get a piece of a hedge fund but I do hear a ring of familiarity here: these guys--like, perhaps, the human race in general--always seem to be assuming that the real party is going on just down the street. As to housing, I'm not sure I agree that it will pass us by: I've seen a condo listed for $700,000-plus here in Palookaville, then knocked down to around six, and still not moving.

Two: I hear that Harry Dixon died last night, at home in Omaha. Harry was an item common enough in the business world, but rarer among lawyers: a guy with big entrepreneurial dreams, and a tendency every so often to jump the rails Harry's main claim to public recognition will be that he virtually created the American Bankruptcy Institute, far and away the most prominent chowder and marching society among denizens of this peculiar craft. A thousand people had the idea (hey, I had the idea). But Harry had the follow through, and I hope he was proud of it.

As a lawyer, Harry was never short of ideas which is, as I suggest, a mixed blessing: some of Harry's came from the gamma quadrant. I remember standing in the back of the classroom one day in the 80s while Harry lectured an audience of lawyers on the devices he deployed to help a debtor client save his farm. "And then we tried...and then we tried...and then we tried." The fellow standing next to me, a respected leader of the bar, was gasping and gagging: oh my God, who is this guy.? Answer: Harry was the kind of guy you would want to know if you were in one whale of a jam, and needed to come up with just one more reason why you should not be sent gurgling down the tube.

Heaven bless you, Harry. You weren't always easy to follow, but you will be hard to forget.