Market · In-house legal talent
Special-situations and restructuring counsel: the seat a seasoning credit book creates.
A direct lending book underwritten in 2021 is worked out in 2026. At that point the question in front of a general counsel stops being who documents the loan and becomes who owns the amendment, the covenant reset and the workout.
What forces a private credit manager to hire this seat?
Six lenses on the same question. Each one is a separate engine of demand, and each one lands on the same small group of people inside the legal function.
Octus titled its Americas private credit outlook for 2026 the year of maturity: loans priced in the low-rate conditions of 2021 are reaching their maturity dates while a slow exit market limits the refinancing-through-sale route. The workload of this seat was set by an underwriting decision taken three to five years ago. The clock is already running.
Each lens above becomes a workstream once a credit goes wrong. The full perimeter is mapped in section 03.
- 372
- US large-company bankruptcies, first half of 2026Highest first-half total since 2010
- S&P Global Market Intelligence via CFO Dive, 13 July 2026
- 33%
- Recovery on a defaulted direct loanAgainst about 52% on a syndicated loan
- Federal Reserve, FEDS Notes, 23 February 2024
- 1.6x
- Median interest coverage, middle-market borrowersMedian gross leverage 6.1x in the same quarter
- KBRA, 28 July 2026
- 50%
- Fed contacts naming private credit a salient risk22% in the fall 2025 survey
- Federal Reserve Financial Stability Report, May 2026
The book is measured to the decimal. The bench that works it out is not measured at all.
Everything on the asset side of this question is published: assets, deployment, maturities, defaults, filings. The legal headcount that has to absorb it is published nowhere, which is why the seat gets funded late.
A private credit manager can tell you, to the dollar, how much it deployed last year. The Alternative Credit Council and Houlihan Lokey put global private credit assets under management at $3.5 trillion in their Financing the Economy 2025 report of 9 December 2025, with $592.8 billion deployed during 2024. What no manager can tell you, and what no source found for this article publishes, is how many lawyers inside it can carry a contested amendment. The asset side of this business is instrumented to a standard a supervisor can audit. The legal side of it is a line item in a headcount plan.
That asymmetry is the whole of the hiring problem, and it has a shape. The Association of Corporate Counsel, reading Bureau of Labor Statistics data on 1 October 2025, recorded the US in-house counsel population rising from 78,000 to 145,000 attorneys between 2008 and 2024, growth of 87 percent against 23 percent for law-firm lawyers. Inside a credit manager, almost all of that growth went where the revenue was: origination, fund formation, compliance. The workout seat is the one function whose workload is set not by this year’s origination plan but by an underwriting decision taken three to five years earlier, which is the kind of demand a headcount plan is worst at anticipating.
The Federal Reserve described the mechanics in its FEDS Note of 23 February 2024, which sized the market at $1.7 trillion with direct lending at roughly $800 billion of it. Three of its findings explain why a workout goes badly without a dedicated seat. A defaulted direct loan recovered about 33 percent against about 52 percent for a syndicated loan. Average interest coverage had fallen to 2.0 times against 2.7 times for leveraged loans. And recent vintages increasingly lacked financial maintenance covenants, the trip-wire that used to force a borrower into the room early. Each individual workout therefore matters more and starts later, which argues for a more senior lawyer than the one who documented the loan, not a cheaper one.
Then there is the measurement problem, which is where a general counsel building the business case usually loses the argument. Four dated series measure defaults in this market and they do not agree. Proskauer’s Private Credit Default Index, published 28 July 2026 over 716 US senior-secured and unitranche loans representing $195.6 billion of original principal, read 2.51 percent for the second quarter of 2026, down from 2.73 percent in the first. KBRA’s Middle Market Default Monitor, published the same day, read 3.3 percent by borrower count across 2,785 borrowers. Fitch’s US Private Credit Default Index stood at 6.0 percent on a trailing twelve-month basis, up from 5.7 percent, as Investment Executive reported on 30 July 2026. A separate, narrower Fitch portfolio of privately monitored ratings hit a record 10.0 percent in the first quarter of 2026, on reporting of 18 June 2026. The two Fitch numbers describe different portfolios and are never interchangeable.
Proskauer index, Q2 2026
716 US senior-secured and unitranche loans
Proskauer, 28 July 2026The rule of thumb worth writing into a board paper is short: pick the index whose portfolio resembles your book, and if you cannot say which one that is, you are not yet in a position to size the seat. The difference between a senior-secured unitranche book and a monitored portfolio of weaker credits is not a rounding error here but a multiple.
Sartori’s own reading of the buyer side says the same thing from the search desk. Our London interview cohort — 750 structured interviews with legal buyers across the city — contains a segment of 58 general counsel, heads of legal and legal chief operating officers at direct lenders, credit funds and diversified managers with a credit arm, interviewed over a rolling 24-month window. Of those 58, 37 said the amendment and covenant-reset workstream in their organization still sits with the lawyer who originated the loan, and that no separate seat owns it. Twenty-two of the 58 said they had never written the workout perimeter down at all. The general counsel of a London-headquartered direct lender put the awkward part of that to us plainly: the amendment lands on the desk of whoever signed the original credit agreement, and that is the person least free to say the structure was wrong.
The asset side of this business is instrumented to a standard a supervisor can audit. The legal side of it is a line item in a headcount plan.
Seven workstreams sit behind the words special situations.
Most job descriptions for this seat name one or two of them and price the role against that shorter list. The other five arrive anyway, usually in the same quarter.
Documented onceRenegotiated every cycle
- The origination file Credit agreement, security package, diligence record. Drafted once by the lawyer who closed the loan, and read for years afterward by somebody else.
- The amendment cycle Waivers, resets, extensions, equity cures. Recurring and negotiated, and the point at which the original drafting either holds or does not.
- The formal process Committee positions, plan strategy, enforcement. Rare, expensive, mostly run by outside counsel from a brief the in-house seat has to write.
The distinction that matters to a buyer is the middle stop. A formal insolvency is the version of this work everyone can picture, and the version least often needed. Moody’s put distressed restructurings at roughly 65 percent of all 2025 private credit defaults in its 28 April 2026 analysis, and noted that its own 2025 default estimate moves between 1.6 and 4.7 percent depending on whether distressed exchanges count as defaults at all. If two thirds of stress resolves by negotiated exchange, the seat a manager needs is a negotiation seat that can escalate, not a bankruptcy litigator who has to learn the credit.
The last column of the table below is the one job specifications almost never fill in: which internal function signs each piece off. A seat that owns the amendment is a different seat, at a different price, from one that reviews a document the portfolio manager already agreed.
| Workstream | What it produces | When the hours land | Who signs it off in-house |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loan documentation audit | A map of pro rata protections, sacred rights and open market purchase language across the existing book | Once, before the next amendment cycle, then at every new facility | Head of legal with the head of portfolio management |
| Amendment and covenant reset | Waiver letters, amended credit agreements, revised reporting packages and equity cure mechanics | Renewal by renewal, and inside thirty days of a covenant trip | In-house counsel, alongside the deal team that originated the loan |
| Liability management defense | Priming analysis, non-pro-rata exchange terms and cooperation agreements between lender groups | In weeks, when another lender group moves first | General counsel, with litigation counsel engaged before the term sheet |
| Distressed exchange and debt-for-control | Exchange documents, new-money structures, governance and board rights on conversion | At the point of restructuring; about two thirds of how defaults resolve | General counsel with the chief investment officer |
| Formal process participation | Creditor committee positions, plan support agreements, class strategy for Chapter 11 or a Part 26A plan | Six to eighteen months after the first covenant breach | General counsel, with outside counsel leading in court |
| Valuation and conflicts governance | Valuation policy, NAV facility conflicts papers and committee minutes a supervisor can read cold | Continuous, and on the examination cycle of the regulator | Chief legal officer, or the chief compliance officer where the roles are split |
| Recovery and collateral realization | Enforcement notices, security reviews, asset sale documents and wind-down papers | Over twelve to twenty-four months after the process closes | Head of legal with the workout lead |
The audit that did not exist three years ago
The first row of that table is new, and it is new for a dateable reason. Two courts ruled on near-identical priming transactions on the same day, 31 December 2024, and reached opposite conclusions. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the Serta Simmons uptier had not occurred on the secondary market for syndicated loans and so was not the open market purchase the credit agreement permitted, reviving the excluded lenders’ contract claims, on Jones Day’s account. The New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, upheld the Mitel Networks uptier because its agreement said purchase without the open market qualifier, as Holland & Knight set the two decisions side by side in January 2025. Same transaction shape, four words apart.
For a lender that is a documentation problem before it is a litigation problem. Every credit already on the book contains, or does not contain, the language that decided those two cases, and nobody inside the manager can say which without reading them. That is finite, in-house work: map the pro rata protections and sacred rights across the portfolio, flag the credits where a rival lender group could move first, and know the answer before the call rather than after it. A job specification written in 2022 does not contain that workstream, and a 2026 book cannot do without it.
Every credit already on the book contains, or does not contain, the language that decided those two cases, and nobody inside the manager can say which without reading them.
Three dated engines: the courts, the supervisors and the cycle.
The demand behind this seat is not a mood. It is a set of rulings, a set of consultations and a set of filing statistics, each with a date and each with a consequence a general counsel can plan against.
Start with the courts, because they moved first and they moved the work. Beyond Serta and Mitel, two cross-border decisions changed which system a large workout runs in. On 23 January 2024 the England and Wales Court of Appeal set aside the sanction of the Adler restructuring plan, reported as [2024] EWCA Civ 24, holding that it had departed from the pari passu principle without justification and introducing a horizontal comparator test between creditor classes in place of a bare rationality review, on Norton Rose Fulbright’s reading and Mayer Brown’s. Five months later, on 27 June 2024, the US Supreme Court decided Harrington v. Purdue Pharma five to four: a reorganization plan cannot discharge claims against a non-debtor without the claimant’s consent.
Read together, those two decisions did not cancel each other out. Freshfields described the English restructuring plan as the comparatively more permissive route for mass claims with third-party releases after Purdue, while the English court had just raised the evidential bar for sanctioning one. For a credit manager sitting in a creditor class, the same file may now be argued under Part 26A of the Companies Act 2006 in London or Chapter 11 in New York, on different fairness tests. That is the point at which a single-jurisdiction restructuring lawyer stops being a complete answer to the brief.
The London leg of the same cycle differs in composition and matches in direction. The Insolvency Service recorded 1,931 company insolvencies in England and Wales in July 2026, including 124 administrations, in its commentary of 18 August 2026, and put administrations across the first seven months of 2026 33 percent above the 2025 average. The 2025 annual picture, published 20 January 2026, showed total insolvencies flat at 23,938 but compulsory liquidations up 15 percent to their highest level since 2012. A shift from debtor-led to creditor-forced processes pulls a lender’s own counsel into the room rather than leaving the file to the borrower’s advisors.
Supervisors are the second engine, and they hit a different part of the perimeter. The Financial Conduct Authority published its private market valuations review on 11 March 2025, a multi-firm exercise across 36 UK-regulated managers, which found methodology broadly consistent but flagged conflicts tied to fee structures and NAV financing and pressed for documented governance, on Debevoise’s summary. The Bank of England launched the scenario phase of its private markets system-wide exploratory exercise on 19 June 2026, reporting in early 2027. In the US, the SEC put fund leverage and NAV lending into its 2025 examination priorities, as ACA Group recorded, and Quinn Emanuel noted on 28 April 2026 that private credit valuation practice had become a 2026 enforcement priority. None of that is workout law. All of it lands on the same in-house function.
The third engine grows the legal function sideways rather than deeper. Following an executive order in August 2025 the Department of Labor proposed a rule on 30 March 2026 broadening access to alternative investments inside workplace retirement plans, and Quinn Emanuel counted nearly 70 ERISA class actions filed in the first quarter of 2026 tied to that exposure. A manager opening a retail channel needs fiduciary capacity next to the workout seat, and the two compete for the same headcount approval.
Behind all three sits the structural driver nobody votes on. The ABA Banking Journal argued in November 2023 that the Basel III Endgame proposal’s treatment of leveraged lending was the largest single tailwind private credit had, and the rule has been reworked since without changing that direction. Moody’s outlook of 21 January 2026 projects private credit assets approaching $4 trillion by 2030. Whatever the final capital numbers say, the trend has held for a decade, and each turn of it adds to a book somebody on the payroll eventually has to work out.
None of that is workout law. All of it lands on the same in-house function.
Three shapes of legal function, and what each one cannot carry.
The same advertisement describes three different jobs. Which one it is depends on whether the workout sits in legal, in portfolio management, or next to the investment desk.
Instructed outsideOwned inside the investment team
- Panel counsel only The manager instructs a restructuring firm credit by credit. Cheapest until two credits go wrong in the same quarter and the briefs start contradicting each other.
- Portfolio management with legal review A non-legal workout function negotiates and in-house counsel reviews the paper. Fast, and structurally short of privilege discipline when the file turns contentious.
- A named seat inside the strategy A lawyer sitting with the chief investment officer and the credit analysts, owning the amendment from term sheet. What the public postings at large managers now describe.
The third shape is no longer theoretical, and the public record shows it in two very different forms. One bank-affiliated asset management arm has advertised a special situations private credit legal seat at vice-president level in New York that reports into a legal analyst line and works directly with chief investment officers and analysts — embedded in the investment desk, not walled off in a legal department. Its stated minimum was two or more years of legal experience. A diversified alternative manager, by contrast, runs business-unit legal verticals in which a strategy attorney at senior vice-president level reports to that unit’s own general counsel, with a stated minimum of ten or more years, a two-state bar admission and a posted band of $210,000 to $275,000. That posting sits in the life sciences vertical rather than the credit one, and is quoted for the structure it reveals, not as a credit-desk band.
Put those two side by side and the useful conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone writing a job description. The same practice label carried a two-year minimum at one large manager and a ten-year minimum at another. An eight-year experience gap under one set of words means the title is not doing any pricing work at all, and the perimeter has to do it instead. Bloomberg Law made the underlying shift explicit in July 2024, when practitioners writing for it described careful managers building portfolio management functions and internal restructuring capability rather than relying on outside firms alone — a characterization, not a survey, and no count of teams accompanies it.
| Employer shape | Legal function | Where the workout sits | What that seat cannot carry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct lender or business development company manager | A small in-house team built around origination, fund formation and compliance | Inside a portfolio management function, with legal reviewing rather than negotiating | A contested amendment fought against a lender group that arrived with its own counsel |
| Diversified alternative manager | Business-unit legal verticals, each reporting to its own strategy general counsel | Inside the credit unit's legal group, at senior counsel level and above | Speed; a strategy seat still inherits the group approval chain on a two-week file |
| Bank-affiliated asset management arm | A legal seat embedded in the investment team, reporting into a legal analyst line | Next to the chief investment officer and the credit analysts, from term sheet onward | Independence; the same seat reviews the credit it helped approve two years earlier |
The external panel is two panels, not one
Whichever shape a manager runs, it keeps outside counsel, and the published rankings carry a warning most general counsel have not priced. Legal 500 ranks 24 US firms across three tiers for Restructuring (including bankruptcy): Corporate in its 2026 edition, nine in the top tier. Chambers ranks a different and smaller cohort of 12 firms across three bands for private credit nationwide, four in the first band. Only seven of those 12 appear anywhere on the 24-firm restructuring list, and only two sit in the top group of both. A manager that appoints a private credit panel and assumes it has bought restructuring cover has, on those two lists, roughly a one-in-six chance of being right.
Firms have been building for that gap in public, and the published benches are how a buyer sizes a panel. One large US firm described its global restructuring practice at nearly 70 full-time restructuring lawyers out of roughly 2,300 in its release of 1 July 2026, when two senior restructuring hires arrived in London; another added a nine-lawyer restructuring and private credit team on 3 June 2024, naming credit funds, business development companies, banks and CLOs as the client base. Weil publishes more than 140 dedicated restructuring lawyers; Davis Polk states that it acts for more than 75 of the Private Debt Investor top hundred managers. The securitized and CLO end of the same market prices its counsel separately again, and is a subject of its own.
The head of legal at a European credit fund with a US platform gave us the version buyers recognize: the first workout in a fund’s life is always run by outside counsel, and the second one is the argument about whether it should have been. That argument is settled by cost, which is the one internal case that survives a budget round.
What the number has to buy, and what no published band will tell you.
A general counsel grading this seat is working without a public price. That leaves the perimeter, the book and the calendar as the only honest anchors there are.
There is no published compensation band for a special situations and restructuring lawyer inside a private credit manager, in London, in New York or anywhere else. The anchors that exist sit on either side of the seat and neither prices it. Above the Law recorded on 5 June 2026 a New York associate base scale, effective 1 July 2026, running from $235,000 for a first year to $455,000 for a seventh year and above. Legal Cheek reported on 21 July 2026 that London newly qualified base pay had reached £150,000 at seven firms, against £189,000 at the high end and £140,000 at three others. Those are firm-wide corporate scales, not restructuring rates. At the other end, the one SEC-filed figure found for this article was a chief legal officer base salary of $350,000 for fiscal 2024 at a listed, direct-lending-heavy alternative manager, filed on 25 April 2025 alongside discretionary cash and equity the filing does not itemize.
Set those out and the gap is the story. A law-firm associate scale describes the opportunity cost of the person a manager is trying to hire; one chief legal officer salary describes the top of the house. Between the two there is no published market for the seat that actually does the work, which is why briefs drift toward the nearest thing anyone can price: a title band an HR system already holds. That is the substitution that grades a seat for a job it was never scoped to do.
Our own telemetry says the correction happens, when it happens, before the search rather than after it. Sartori has worked the London in-house market for more than ten years. Over the trailing three years we closed 24 in-house searches in this city with a completion rate of 93 percent, a typical timeline of four to seven months, and a median of 13 working days between offer and signature. Six of those 24 were private credit or credit fund legal seats, and four of the six were regraded upward during the briefing stage, once the workstreams behind the words had been listed out. Counter-offer incidence across the whole London in-house book runs at 32 percent, and in the credit segment the counter-offer usually arrives as a widened remit rather than as money, which is the same repricing failure arriving from the other direction.
The uncomfortable part of our own data belongs here too. Sartori maps roughly 30,000 lawyers in London, and that map is built from law-firm and in-house legal records. The workout skill frequently sits under a portfolio management or asset management title, which is not a legal title, so the map does not see it. In three of those six private credit mandates the lawyer who reached the shortlist came through a referral rather than through the map. A referral is not a search method, and we treat this practice as a long-lead market for that reason rather than as a database exercise.
London is a creditor-side and supervisory seat, with a restructuring plan regime that got harder to use and two regulators actively rewriting the governance expectations around it.
- The process mix is shifting toward contest. Compulsory liquidations rose 15 percent in 2025 to their highest level since 2012, on Insolvency Service figures published 20 January 2026, and administrations ran a third above the 2025 average through the first seven months of 2026.
- The plan is harder to sanction. After Adler on 23 January 2024, a Part 26A plan needs valuation evidence and cross-class fairness analysis built at the drafting stage, not produced at a contested hearing.
- Governance is examinable. The Financial Conduct Authority reviewed 36 managers on valuation practice and the Bank of England is running a private markets stress exercise reporting in early 2027. A head of legal here owns papers a supervisor will read.
- What to hire for: amendment negotiation, restructuring plan strategy from a creditor class, and valuation and conflicts governance that survives an examination.
New York is a documentation and litigation seat, where the drafting of a credit agreement signed years ago now decides the outcome and the filing volumes keep rising.
- The volume is real. S&P Global Market Intelligence counted 372 large-company bankruptcies in the first half of 2026, the highest first-half total since 2010, with Subchapter V filings up 50 percent year on year to 1,663, as CFO Dive reported on 13 July 2026.
- The drafting decides it. Serta and Mitel put the outcome of a priming transaction inside the four corners of the credit agreement, so a documentation audit is a New York-anchored workstream even for a manager based elsewhere.
- The releases closed. Purdue removed nonconsensual third-party releases from the Chapter 11 toolkit on 27 June 2024, which changes what a creditor class can be offered and what it should refuse.
- What a London buyer should note: the two skills are not interchangeable, and this page quotes Sartori search constants for London only. No New York figures of ours appear here.
Two engagements, anonymized
Both are composites drawn from our London in-house book. No client, firm or lawyer is identified, and the numbers sit inside the constants above.
- A direct lender with a 2021 vintage book. The brief arrived as credit counsel, to support a seasoning unitranche portfolio. Diligence on the brief found the amendment and covenant-reset workstream sitting with the deal team that had originated the loans, and no owner at all for the documentation audit. The seat was regraded from senior counsel to head of legal before it went to market and closed at five months, inside our four-to-seven-month band, because the perimeter was fixed before the first approach rather than after the first offer was refused.
- A credit fund with a US platform. The brief said restructuring lawyer, the market read that as a bankruptcy litigator, and the first two shortlists came back accordingly. Rewritten around the documentation audit and the amendment negotiation, the search closed at seven months, at the top of our band. This is the segment where we place slowly, and the reason is that the brief and the market use the same three words for two different jobs.
In the first-quarter 2026 wave of our quarterly survey of London in-house legal buyers, 54 responses came back, and 33 of those buyers said they would fund a dedicated workout seat only after the first amendment cycle had arrived. That is a defensible budget position and an expensive hiring position at once, because the market for the seat tightens in the quarter every manager reaches the same conclusion. A legal chief operating officer at a mid-sized credit manager called it a sequencing problem rather than a money problem: the approval is easy to win once the need is obvious, and by then so is everybody else’s.
Our view of where this goes is narrow and testable. The outstanding book keeps growing against a maturity profile that is public, so the next turn of the cycle generates an amendment and exchange wave against a larger base than the last one, on the same twelve-to-twenty-four-month shape, into the same thin pool. Managers that name the amendment workstream in a seat now will hire against a published calendar. Managers that wait will hire inside the wave.
Our in-house counsel recruiting practice starts from the perimeter rather than the title, and our search methodology sets out how a shortlist is built. The wider demand picture sits in the private capital practice map and the industry view on our private credit page.
Common questions about special situations and restructuring counsel
What does special situations and restructuring counsel actually do inside a private credit manager?
Seven workstreams, and only one of them is a courtroom. The seat audits loan documentation for uptier exposure, negotiates amendments and covenant resets, defends or runs liability management transactions, papers distressed exchanges and debt-for-control conversions, holds the creditor position in a formal process, keeps valuation and conflicts governance a supervisor can read, and closes out recovery and collateral realization. Moody’s put distressed restructurings at about 65 percent of all 2025 private credit defaults on 28 April 2026, which means the modal file is a negotiation, not a filing.
How many restructuring lawyers does a private credit manager actually need?
No published source answers that, and this article does not invent a ratio. What is published is the denominator: the size of the book, its maturity profile, and the default series against it. A general counsel can count the credits underwritten in 2021 and 2022 that reach maturity inside the next eight quarters, count the amendments each one is likely to generate, and grade the seat against that number rather than against a job title.
Why do the published private credit default rates disagree so much?
Because they measure different portfolios: four dated series covering mid-2026 run from 2.51 percent to 10.0 percent, a spread of roughly four to one. Proskauer’s index of 716 US senior-secured and unitranche loans read 2.51 percent for the second quarter of 2026; KBRA’s middle-market monitor read 3.3 percent by borrower count; Fitch’s US Private Credit Default Index read 6.0 percent on a trailing twelve-month basis; and Fitch’s separate, narrower privately monitored ratings portfolio hit a record 10.0 percent in the first quarter of 2026. A workout desk sized off “the default rate” can be wrong by a factor of four.
Does the seat sit in the legal department or in portfolio management?
Both, and they hire differently: two public postings at large managers set the minimum for the same practice label at two years in one case and ten in the other. One embeds the seat next to chief investment officers and analysts; the other places it inside a business-unit legal vertical reporting to its own general counsel. The title cannot price the seat.
What changed for the seat after the Serta and Mitel rulings?
A documentation audit became a standing workstream on 31 December 2024, when two courts reached opposite results on near-identical priming transactions. The Fifth Circuit held the Serta Simmons uptier was not a valid open market purchase; the New York Appellate Division upheld the Mitel Networks uptier the same day, because that credit agreement carried no equivalent qualifier. Outcome now turns on wording already signed, so an in-house team has to map its own book before another lender group moves.
Is there a published pay band for this seat?
No. The nearest public anchors sit on either side of it and neither prices a workout desk. Above the Law recorded a New York associate base scale of $235,000 to $455,000 effective 1 July 2026, and Legal Cheek put London newly qualified base pay at £150,000 at seven firms on 21 July 2026. The one SEC-filed figure found for this article was a chief legal officer base salary of $350,000 for fiscal 2024 at a single listed alternative manager. One company is not a band.
Court opinions, supervisory reviews, official filing statistics and four rating-agency default series.
Rulings come from the courts and from counsel summaries of them. Filing volumes come from the Administrative Office of the US Courts and the Insolvency Service. Default readings come from Proskauer, KBRA, Fitch and Moody's. Pay anchors come from the legal press and a proxy statement.
Sources & further reading
47 references- Sartori & Partners — London Legal Talent Research Programme (750 structured interviews; ~30,000 lawyers mapped; quarterly surveys since 2019; mandate telemetry) sartoriglobal.com ↗
- Alternative Credit Council and Houlihan Lokey — Financing the Economy 2025 (9 December 2025) aima.org ↗
- Federal Reserve Board — Private Credit: Characteristics and Risks, FEDS Notes (23 February 2024) federalreserve.gov ↗
- Financial Stability Board — Report on Vulnerabilities in Private Credit (6 May 2026) fsb.org ↗
- Federal Reserve Board — Financial Stability Report (May 2026) federalreserve.gov ↗
- Proskauer — Private Credit Default Index, second quarter 2026 (28 July 2026) proskauer.com ↗
- KBRA — Private Credit: Q2 2026 Middle Market Compendium (28 July 2026) kbra.com ↗
- Investment Executive — U.S. private credit defaults rise: Fitch (30 July 2026) investmentexecutive.com ↗
- The Lead Left — middle-market private credit roundup citing Fitch privately monitored ratings data (18 June 2026) theleadleft.com ↗
- Moody's Ratings — US corporate default risk in 2026 (28 April 2026) moodys.com ↗
- Moody's Ratings — Private credit outlook 2026 (21 January 2026) moodys.com ↗
- Administrative Office of the US Courts — Bankruptcies Increase 11.9 Percent (23 April 2026) uscourts.gov ↗
- CFO Dive — US corporate bankruptcies hover at 16-year high: S&P (13 July 2026) cfodive.com ↗
- Insolvency Service — Commentary: Company Insolvency Statistics July 2026 (18 August 2026) gov.uk ↗
- Insolvency Service — Commentary: Company Insolvency Statistics December 2025 (20 January 2026) gov.uk ↗
- Yahoo Finance — Leveraged loan issuers lean in to amend-and-extend deals, republishing PitchBook LCD data (17 July 2026) finance.yahoo.com ↗
- Jones Day — Fifth Circuit Rules That Serta Simmons Uptier Violated Credit Agreement (2025) jonesday.com ↗
- Holland & Knight — A Tale of 2 Rulings: Serta, Mitel Cases Remind Why Contract Language Matters (January 2025) hklaw.com ↗
- Norton Rose Fulbright — English Court of Appeal sets aside Adler restructuring plan (January 2024) nortonrosefulbright.com ↗
- Mayer Brown — Adler: Court of Appeal sets aside sanction of a Restructuring Plan (March 2024) mayerbrown.com ↗
- Faegre Drinker — Supreme Court Decides Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, L.P. (June 2024) faegredrinker.com ↗
- Freshfields — Restructuring plans: 2024 in review and predictions for 2025 freshfields.com ↗
- ABA Banking Journal — The Basel III Endgame Proposal: Yet Another Gift to Private Credit Funds (November 2023) bankingjournal.aba.com ↗
- Debevoise & Plimpton — The FCA's Private Market Valuations Review (March 2025) debevoise.com ↗
- Bank of England — Private markets system-wide exploratory scenario (19 June 2026) bankofengland.co.uk ↗
- ACA Group — NAV Lending: Regulatory Considerations acaglobal.com ↗
- Quinn Emanuel — Private Credit Under Stress: Emerging Litigation Risks (28 April 2026) quinnemanuel.com ↗
- Katten — Private Credit Developments: Regulatory Signals and Emerging Litigation Trends katten.com ↗
- Legal 500 — United States: Restructuring (including bankruptcy): Corporate legal500.com ↗
- Chambers and Partners — Private Credit, USA: Nationwide chambers.com ↗
- Weil, Gotshal & Manges — Restructuring practice weil.com ↗
- Vinson & Elkins — Private Credit, Alternative Capital & Special Situations velaw.com ↗
- Davis Polk — Private Credit davispolk.com ↗
- Mayer Brown — Special Situations mayerbrown.com ↗
- Latham & Watkins — Three restructuring and special situations partners join in New York and Chicago (17 October 2025) lw.com ↗
- Paul Hastings — nine-lawyer restructuring and private credit team addition (3 June 2024) paulhastings.com ↗
- Sidley Austin — senior restructuring hires in London (1 July 2026) sidley.com ↗
- Bloomberg Law — Direct Lenders Should Prepare for Private Credit Restructuring (25 July 2024) news.bloomberglaw.com ↗
- Bloomberg Law — In-House Counsel Hiring Far Outpaces Law Firm, Government Growth news.bloomberglaw.com ↗
- Octus — Americas Private Credit 2026 Outlook: The Year of Maturity octus.com ↗
- Above the Law — Associate Compensation Scorecard: The 2026 Summer Of Salary Increases (5 June 2026) abovethelaw.com ↗
- Legal Cheek — Baker McKenzie boosts NQ lawyer pay to £150k, matching Magic Circle (21 July 2026) legalcheek.com ↗
- SEC EDGAR — Blue Owl Capital Inc., DEF 14A proxy statement (filed 25 April 2025) sec.gov ↗
- Public job posting — Special Situations Private Credit Legal Consultant, Vice President, at a bank-affiliated asset management arm (accessed 3 September 2026) builtin.com ↗
- Public job posting — business-unit attorney, senior vice president, at a diversified alternative manager (accessed 3 September 2026) builtin.com ↗
- Sartori & Partners — Capital Solutions: Buzzword or New Legal Practice? ↗
- Sartori & Partners — Private Credit, Funds and PE: The Practices Driving Partner Demand ↗
The four default series measure different portfolios: senior-secured and unitranche loans at Proskauer, middle-market borrowers at KBRA, and two separate Fitch portfolios of which the privately monitored one is narrower and more distressed. Amendment volume is a broadly syndicated loan measure standing in for stressed-borrower activity. Compensation figures are firm-wide associate scales and one company's proxy disclosure. Sartori figures are London in-house program constants and are reviewed by hand before publication.
Adjacent seats on the same private capital map.
Collateral, documentation and a thin bench of specialist buyers recur across these markets. These pieces extend the map without repeating this article's argument.
Capital Solutions: Buzzword or New Legal Practice?
The firm-side question this article leaves alone: whether the label describes a real practice, and how the work maps across firms.
Read the label questionPrivate Credit, Funds and PE
The wider private-capital demand cluster around this seat, across credit, funds and buyout, and the cities it moves through.
Read the private-capital stackFund Finance and Subscription-Line Counsel
The adjacent collateral and capacity bottleneck, where NAV facilities and opinion work meet a thin bench of in-house buyers.
Read the fund-finance mapA quiet conversation
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