Jones Day
Put aside Jones Day’s silver-medal regulatory practice. Put aside its successful Texas wildcatter fight for Kurdish oil in London high court. You could even throw out the 4,000 tobacco cases it resolved, or the preservation of the world’s biggest airline merger. Jones Day deserves honor for the Detroit bankruptcy alone. The firm managed 1,146 discovery requests from 27 objectors, 70-plus depositions over six weeks, more than a dozen in limine responses in 96 hours, and a 58-mile judicial bus tour of urban blight. Inventing a new model for cities in distress, Jones Day cut Detroit’s debt by $7 billion, while balancing pension obligations with constitutional limits, negotiating the philanthropic rescue of the city’s art collection, and reinvesting $1.7 billion into Motown’s future. Now that deserves R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
