Article
Sprayregen’s Encore Decade Aims to Bolster Paul Weiss’ One-Stop-Shop for Debtor Clients
By: Harvard Zhang
Jamie Sprayregen is looking forward to a “ten-year-ish” tenure at Paul Weiss, and the bankruptcy titan has never thought of his career as work.
“There is a Mark Twain quote, ‘Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life,’ which is how I feel about what I do,” Sprayregen, 66, said in an interview with Octus, as he started a new role recently to co-lead Paul Weiss’ restructuring practice. “Restruturing is one of the greatest spaces for professionals who are intellectually curious and creative and want to help their clients.”
“I’m coming in with a goal of hopefully making the group bigger, better, faster, and stronger and trying to do what I can to further elevate the group, the debtors’ side in particular,” he said. “We offer one-stop shopping, from capital markets transactions, to liability management deals, to restructuring, so the clients know they are in good hands.”
Sprayregen noted that Paul Weiss’ back-end restructuring expertise informs properly structuring front-end liability management exercises, which partly ties into the trend of prebaking and prewiring a subsequent out-of-court restructuring as part of an LME to save subsequent costs and time. “If you are really good at firefighting, you are probably good at fire prevention,” he said.
The restructuring veteran said his top priority at the moment is serving clients’ needs, along with a focus on business development and marketing, connecting with the restructuring and capital markets communities, and letting his network know of his and Paul Weiss’ availability and capability to help. He also wants to know the people in his group and at the firm better and plans to be in New York for about 100 days a year as he has done for the last four decades. Sprayregen lives in Chicago.
The group will be chasing both public as well as private equity-backed company work, according to Sprayregen. The economy is doing “okay,” but the quantum of corporate debt means companies’ capital structures will need some assistance, he said. The group will also balance debtor work with creditor engagements, which is a business selection process, he added.
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