Welcome back to 9fin’s league tables for law firms advising creditors and debtors on US restructurings and special situations.
In our numbers, we consider mandates that either started or concluded (or both) in H1 26 for situations involving over $50m of debt and for which the debtors are either US-headquartered or have the US as a primary country of risk.
The underlying data in the tables is based on our own reporting, third-party reporting available in the public domain, public company filings, court filings, and information from firms who responded to our requests for data.
Note we publish semi-annual league tables for law firms and going forward plan to include league tables for financial advisors involved on US restructurings and special situations.
If you would like your firm to be featured in future editions, please get in touch here.
Key insights
Before we dive into the league tables, the data showed some noteworthy insights:
- Most crowded deals — Del Monte Foods and United Site Services have 11 different legal advisors
- Most debt — Warner Bros Discovery is the biggest case of the year by debt, with $33.8bn
- Most debt in an LME — Optimum Communications had $25.1bn in debt
- Most debt in a Chapter 11 — Dish DBS which has $15.25bn in debt, with White & Case representing the company
- Distressed sectors — The data showed that the sectors under the most stress include: consumer discretionary (14 cases), communications services (12 cases) and healthcare (11 cases)
- Main drivers of distress — What seems to be driving distressed situations is liquidity need (23 cases), earnings pressure (22 cases) and unsustainable capital structures (13 cases)
- Court supervised vs LME — In-court processes appear 65 times in the collected data vs 24 LMEs
- Cooperation agreements — Cooperation agreements showed up across 17 situations
- Cycle stage — Perhaps most interesting, across the 106 cases that 9fin tracked for H1 26, 65 cases are still ongoing vs the 41 that are completed, which suggests that the wave of distress is still picking up rather than winding down for the year
League tables
Without further ado, below please find the results of the league tables. We have included 11 categories:
- Total mandates — including new and closed and includes company, creditor, UCC, agents and sponsor advisors
- Total new mandates — any mandate that begun between 1 January 2026-30 June 2026
- Total closed mandates — any mandate that closed between 1 January 2026-30 June 2026
- New court-supervised mandates for debtor advisors
- New court supervised mandates for creditor advisors
- New out-of-court supervised mandates for company advisors
- New out-of-court supervised mandates for creditor advisors
- Closed court-supervised mandates for debtor advisors
- Closed court-supervised mandates for creditor advisors
- Closed out-of-court mandates for company advisors
- Closed out-of-court mandates for creditor advisors
