A $300,000 contract to provide restructuring advice to financially crippled Detroit awarded to Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone in December—over strong city council opposition—is about to become considerably more lucrative for the Michigan law firm.
Initially executed while Detroit and Michigan officials sought to restructure the city's finances under an agreement struck in April 2012, the contract in question now encompasses the much larger task of helping Motor City as it seeks to become the largest U.S. municipality to ever go bankrupt. That additional workload raises the contract's value to $1.2 million, according to details on the revisions available in public documents obtained by The Am Law Daily. And with Detroit's emergency financial manager, Kevyn Orr, serving as the city's sole decision maker, that revised pact is set to be approved without input from the council that resisted it so fiercely in the first place because of conflict-of-interest questions stemming from Miller Canfield's work drafting the state law that created Orr's job and serving as Detroit's longtime bond counsel.
