Howard M. Levine is a senior bankruptcy and restructuring lawyer with more than four decades of experience advising companies, creditors, lenders, fiduciaries, and other stakeholders in complex financial restructurings, and high-value commercial disputes.
He is regularly engaged in matters where substantial value is at stake, competing constituencies must be managed, and sophisticated legal and financial issues require both strategic judgment and courtroom experience. Howard represents clients in Chapter 11 reorganizations, distressed transactions, creditor and lender disputes, bankruptcy litigation, fiduciary matters, fraudulent-transfer and preference litigation, receiverships, and complex commercial proceedings. He has also actively worked behind the scenes in resolving financial distressed situations involving companies that never made it to court.
Howard’s experience spans some of the most complex corporate restructurings and insolvency matters of the past several decades, including representing significant parties in cases such as PG&E, WorldCom, Enron, Kal Freight Inc., Hawaiian Airlines, Orexigen Therapeutics, PSI Net Inc., VarTec Inc., Teligent Inc., and Society of Jesus, Oregon Province, and the Archdiocese of Portland. His matters have involved millions of dollars in claims, contested reorganizations, DIP financing, sophisticated creditor constituencies, emergency proceedings, and litigation.
A defining feature of Howard’s practice is his experience on both sides of the restructuring table. He has represented debtors seeking to preserve and reorganize enterprise value as well as secured and unsecured creditors seeking to maximize recoveries and enforce their rights. That perspective enables him to assess a restructuring from multiple critical angles—legal, financial, strategic, and adversarial—and to identify the issues most likely to influence the outcome.
Howard’s litigation practice is closely integrated with his restructuring work. He handles disputes involving secured-creditor rights, fraudulent transfers, preferences, fiduciary duties, corporate governance, fraud, lender enforcement, receiverships, and other complex financial claims. He has obtained emergency injunctive relief, significant judgments, and other consequential remedies in contested federal and state court proceedings.
His representative matters include the representation of major creditors in nationally significant Chapter 11 proceedings; debtor-side representation in landmark restructurings involving religious organizations; sophisticated creditor and restructuring work in major corporate insolvencies; and representation of a Chapter 11 trustee in a nationwide cattle Ponzi scheme. He has been admitted to practice law pro hac vice and appeared in court for clients with significant issues in courts located in New York, Delaware, Texas, California, Florida, Wyoming, Missouri, Michigan, Oklahoma, Alaska, and elsewhere.
Howard began his career with a two-year clerkship for U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Donal D. Sullivan of the District of Oregon and joined Sussman Shank in 1982. He became a partner in 1987 and has served as chair of the firm’s Business Restructuring & Bankruptcy Group. He is admitted to practice in all courts in both Oregon and Washington.
Howard brings to complex restructurings the perspective of a lawyer who has spent most of his career at the intersection of bankruptcy, litigation, finance, and business strategy. His focus is straightforward: understand the client’s objectives, identify the leverage that matters, anticipate the opposing constituencies, and work with the client to execute a strategy designed to produce a meaningful result.
