Bankruptcy Brothers: Ken and Sandy Rosen

Growing up in northern New Jersey, fraternal twin brothers Ken and Sandy Rosen didn’t share a dream of becoming bankruptcy lawyers. But since the late 1970s, the siblings have led parallel careers in the New York and New Jersey restructuring scenes—so parallel, in fact, that many in the profession don’t actually know they’re related.

Sandy forged the family path into bankruptcy law, deciding in law school that he liked how the practice “dealt with solutions to actual problems in real time.” He joined a creditors’ rights firm in 1978 and branched out on his own eight years later. Now, he represents small- and mid-market debtors as well as parties in bankruptcy-related litigation at his own law firm.

Ken, meanwhile, tried his hand at business school but switched to law school midway through. He finished both degrees in December 1979 and had two job offers: to do tax work with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Boston or to be a financial analyst in New York at a fledgling Justice Department unit called the U.S. Trustee’s Office. He took the U.S. trustee position.

“I guess I sort of fell into it,” Ken says. “I never took a bankruptcy course.”

Formed as part of the 1978 creation of the Bankruptcy Code, the U.S. Trustee Program started as a pilot project. Ken’s first boss at the Justice Department was Irving Picard, the attorney perhaps best-known for winding down Bernard Madoff’s old firm. And the associate trustee at the time was Neil Blackshear, who later became a bankruptcy judge.

Unsure how long the trustee’s office would be around, Ken left after a few years for private practice, lured by a salary bump to $22,000 from $18,000. “You don’t turn away that kind of money,” he recalls. His first assignment, working on the bankruptcy of paper company and copier manufacturer Saxon Industries, set him permanently down the restructuring path.

Now, as the New Jersey-based head of the bankruptcy, financial reorganization and creditors’ rights department at Lowenstein Sandler, he is just as often representing creditors as debtors. In recent years, Kenneth and his partners at Lowenstein have worked as creditor’s counsel to Coldwater Creek and vacuum maker Oreck Corp. and as debtor’s counsel to children’s product maker Kid Brands, and clothing chains Dots and Love Culture.

Sandy still runs his own four-lawyer firm in New York, Rosen & Associates, which has served as debtor’s counsel in the bankruptcies of truck-body firm Grumman Olson Industries, Arcade Publishing and circuit-board maker PJC Technologies and as counsel to officers in Enron and Lehr Construction.

“It never really felt as though we were both competing in the same arena, in some way,” Sandy says. The two can’t recall ever working in a significant way on the same case, though Sandy says he’s represented landlords in some of Ken’s retail cases. (The twins’ older brother, Mark, is also a lawyer, though not in bankruptcy.)

“It’s funny,” Ken says, “even contemporaries of ours have on occasion expressed surprise to learn we are brothers.”

Write to Sara Randazzo at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @sara_randazzo.