Lehman Comes Back From the Dead

In the glory days before its collapse in September 2008, Lehman Brothers Holdings was the fourth-largest investment bank in the nation, headquartered in its own 32-story skyscraper on Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue with a block-long electronic billboard that flashed a promotional video night and day. Today the offices of Lehman Brothers are tucked away on two floors in the Time & Life Building, half a block away, where about 430 workers labor to unwind derivatives trades and sell illiquid assets that helped bring the firm down.

While Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy filing—the largest ever in the U.S.—froze credit markets and plunged the economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression, it didn’t kill the company. Having emerged from bankruptcy in March, the 162-year-old firm now lives with one goal: generating as much money as possible to pay off former clients, creditors, and trading partners, ranging from Goldman Sachs Group and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority to the New York Giants. Coming out of bankruptcy “can be the starting point for a somewhat extended period during which the assets will be liquidated and distributions made,” says Weil Gotshal & Manges partner Harvey Miller, who has been Lehman’s lead lawyer since the bankruptcy. “It is often hard work.”