Bankruptcy Beat Snapshot: Lisa Jacobs

Attorney Lisa Jacobs is a hockey fan, but when it comes to her legal practice, she’s happy to mix sports metaphors.

The new DLA Piper partner peppers many of her insights and explanations with examples that would strike a chord with any watcher of athletics. She references the “games” to be played in bankruptcy court and describes how to keep one’s “eye on the puck” while negotiating deals. But one phrase is particularly well-chosen: “relief pitcher.” It’s exactly the role Jacobs found herself in about 12 years ago in the bankruptcy case of the Pittsburgh Penguins.

It was the summer of 1999, and hockey star Mario Lemieux had rounded up a group of investors to make a bid for the struggling National Hockey League franchise. Lemieux had offered to credit bid a chunk of debt the team owed to him, and investors came on board with extra funds.

“There was a lot of emotional and political appeal to this plan,” Jacobs said. “The great Mario was going to stay very involved in Pittsburgh hockey, and everybody liked that idea.”

Great idea, in theory, but the parties were having some trouble putting it into practice. That’s when Jacobs was brought in “to shake things up” and get the 22 bankruptcy attorneys (all male, all clad in dark suits) to strike a deal.

“They all wanted to go backward, and it was my job to push them forward,” she said.

Jacobs understood the bankruptcy issues that formed the backdrop to the deal after spending more than three years as a bankruptcy attorney. During her time taking on matters like the debt restructuring of Nicaragua, she found that she loved engineering creative solutions in bankruptcy cases but wasn’t as taken with the litigation aspect of the practice.

“Litigation for me was always more of a zero-sum game,” she said.

Her natural gravitation toward a “win-win scenario,” in contrast, helped her ink a deal for the Penguins case before summer’s end and also shaped her current practice. Jacobs now focuses on transactional work, like loan workouts and organizational and debt restructurings. She often works with private equity firms, which means she touches bankruptcy “all the time” as her clients buy distressed companies or distressed debt in and out of bankruptcy court.

In Jacobs’s new home at DLA Piper, she’s also looking forward to furthering her love of sports law, a piece of the legal field that speaks to her as more than just an individual fan. “You realize what you’re doing does have an impact…on so many people,” she said.