Retiring New Jersey Bankruptcy Judge Donald Steckroth to Join Cole S...

As U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Donald Steckroth retires from the New Jersey bench and prepares to join Cole Schotz PC, he has just one concern for the colleagues he’s leaving behind: whether the U.S. Supreme Court will continue to limit the power of the bankruptcy court.

The Supreme Court is currently weighing the latest in a series of cases to determine whether bankruptcy judges can offer final judgments on certain issues. The court’s decision, eagerly awaited by bankruptcy judges and practitioners alike, should be out by the end of June.

“I don’t know how the system would run, frankly, if the jurisdiction was taken away from the court,” Judge Steckroth, 67, says.

As of Monday, Judge Steckroth will be watching the case as a private practitioner instead of as one of the nation’s roughly 350 bankruptcy-court judges. After serving a 14-year term on the bench in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New Jersey, he’ll be joining the law firm Cole Schotz as a member at the beginning of next month.

“I’m a little nostalgic and melancholy, but excited about going on to something else,” Judge Steckroth said Friday during his final day at the court.

In recent years, Judge Steckroth’s caseload has included overseeing the Chapter 11 cases of women’s retailers Dots and Mandee’s, as well as baby and toddler product manufacturer Kid Brands.

In 2013, Judge Steckroth penned a decision in a nursing-home case that created precedent for modifying union contracts in bankruptcy. The decision was cited heavily in an October ruling that allowed Trump Entertainment to cancel healthcare and pension benefits at the beleaguered Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, N.J. (Taj Mahal’s union employees have appealed the ruling and held a protest last week outside the office of billionaire Carl Icahn to reinstate the benefits.)

Judge Steckroth, who spent 28 years as a bankruptcy lawyer at New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons PC before becoming a judge, said he’s looking forward to joining Cole Schotz after watching it over the years become one of the “preeminent bankruptcy and reorganization firms in the region.”

The New Jersey bankruptcy court that Judge Steckroth is leaving is in the middle of a generational change, New Jersey Law Journal recently reported.

By the middle of this year, six of the court’s nine judges will have turned over in a two-year period, due to one death and a number of retirements.

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