At the end of this article are the links to the first six parts of this series with brief descriptions of what the stories are about.
Part 7 counted what the professionals took to bury the company. They collected $247 million in the first six months. Weil Gotshal & Manges billed 30,325 hours in one quarter. Alvarez & Marsal was paid $67.8 million to dismantle the company it had been hired to save.
Then they planned a litigation trust to keep the meter running through 2028. They would be paid first. The creditors would wait.
Part 8.
A bankruptcy the size of First Brands does not run itself.
Somebody has to handle it. And in this case, the men who handle it bill for every tenth of an hour they spend on handling it.
What the Numbers Say
Compare their fees to what the company sold, and we will find a wonderful symmetry.
They sell off the company just to pay their fees. The bankruptcy seems to exist just for the firms handling the bankruptcy.
The idea that creditors are getting paid propels the justification for the fees. It’s a legal fiction.
Every First Brands asset sale this series has been able to identify — Walbro, Horizon North America, Toledo Molding & Die, Jasper Rubber, and the brand names sold to PGI Northstar — comes to about $227 million.
Six months of professional fees came to $247 million.
The pros (and they are, you must admit, pros) who took First Brands apart through the legal feeding called bankruptcy billed more than the parts of the company broken up wholesale.
Alvarez & Marsal billed $67.8 million.
Horizon North America, the towing and trailering business, one of the largest single assets sold in the bankruptcy, fetched $64 million.
The firm hired to save the company but changed its mind, and sold it off instead, towed away more than the huge towing division of First Brands got.
Creditors Last
Creditors can wait. Bankruptcy works like that. Even the guys hired to protect the creditors get paid before the creditors do. The creditors' committee's lawyers, bankers and investigators billed $38.6 million, out of the estate the creditors are still waiting on.
Guys like Charles Moore of Alvarez & Marsal.
Lawyers like Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
They do the heavy lifting (billing).
Weil has 1,100 lawyers in 20 offices, built on a restructuring and bankruptcy practice.
First Brands hired Weil, and paid the law firm in advance, to prepare the Chapter 11 filing.
Alvarez & Marsal was hired to save the company.
Weil was hired to file the bankruptcy.
Then the lenders forced First Brands founder Patrick James out, and Weil's client became a company run by Charles Moore of Alvarez & Marsal.
The law firm James's company retained (Weil) is now suing James, and has billed the estate $109 million in six months.
They had lots to do.
Together, the two firms James brought in — one to rescue the company, one to file for bankruptcy protection — shuttered it instead, and have billed more than $177 million between them.
It's a billing frenzy. It's not over yet.
Between the two firms, they billed, for instance, 58,000 hours in the first three months of this year alone.
If you average it out, that's 114 people working full time, every day on First Brands bankruptcy.
In Fairness
Of course, First Brands wasn't just one company. It was 112 legal entities.
Every one of them needed schedules of assets and liabilities, a statement of financial affairs, and monthly operating reports for as long as the case runs.
Tens of thousands of hours of grunt work. Grunt work, by the way, paid at $695 to $2,850 per hour.
Then 25,000-plus creditors, each filing a claim that somebody reconciles against the books, objects to, or allows.
Thousands of executory contracts and leases, each requiring a decision to assume or reject, each decision a motion.
Seventeen plant closures, each with WARN Act notices, severance, environmental liability, and in some cases a union.
Foreign entities in Australia, the Netherlands, Mexico, and China, several running parallel insolvency proceedings under their own nation's laws.
Add an examiner demanding documents, 14 terabytes to review for privilege before anything goes out the door, a criminal case in Manhattan requiring the company to coordinate with DOJ while protecting privilege, and a plan and disclosure statement to draft and negotiate with a hostile creditors' committee.
That is a lot of work.
It is not, or at least arguably it should not be, 58,000 hours in 90 days.
Padding Makes Life Comfortable
They bill with precision, itemized in tenths of an hour, with a narrative description of every entry — timekeeper name, date, hours, rate, and what they say they did. It is on the docket.
Here is one hour.
January 15, 2026.
The entry reads:
MEET WITH ENTIRE AFFIRMATIVE LITIGATION TEAM RE RESPONSE TO MOTION TO DISMISS AND DISCOVERY (1.0).
Thirteen Weil timekeepers billed that hour.
Cost to the estate: $18,630.
Two of the thirteen — Fiona Benson and Haven Lerner — are listed in Weil's own rate schedule as not yet admitted to practice law. They are not lawyers yet. They billed $975 an hour to sit on the call.
Here is a weekend. New Year's Day, six lawyers, $22,156.
Saturday, January 3, ten lawyers, $75,705.
Sunday, January 4, nine lawyers, $71,704 — Hira Baig billed eleven hours that Sunday, and Ryan Hor billed 11.7. Three days over a holiday weekend, $169,565, on one task code out of forty-eight.
Here is the honor system at work.
On January 28, there was an all-hands litigation call.
Matt Barr logged it at 1.0 hours.
Sunny Singh logged it at 1.0.
David Lender logged it at 0.7.
Theodore Tsekerides, 0.7.
Robert Niles-Weed, 0.7.
Kevin Bostel, 0.6.
Same call. Six partners. Three different lengths.
About $11,600 for one hour of conversation. Nobody reconciles it. Nobody has to.
And then there is the entry that captures the whole system.
Task Code 037: Weil Retention/Billing/Fee Applications. Three hundred sixty-two hours, $430,821 — Weil billing the estate to prepare Weil's own bills.
Add the codes for reading everyone else's bills, and it comes to 539 hours and $686,089.
The court asks, on a standard form, whether the application includes time spent preparing and revising invoices. Weil answers yes. It asks whether it includes time spent redacting the time records. Weil answers yes.
Two-thirds of a million dollars in paperwork about the paperwork.
They bill you for writing the bill.
$430,821 over 362.90 hours works out to about $1,187 an hour for clerical billing work.
Make-Work
The incentive structure is genuinely perverse (in a good way for lawyers). Nobody at the table is spending their own money.
First Brands is now a shell (with assets) run by the professionals who bill by the hour with almost no accountability and no imperitive other than sell off the assets to at least pay for their billings.
The creditors, who would fight over every hour, are last in line and have no vote on fees.
The judge approves them, but a judge reviewing 30,000 time entries has no practical way to second-guess whether that Tuesday call needed six lawyers.
These are repeat players. The same dozen firms, the same handful of districts, the same judges.
A restructuring firm that fights another firm's fees today gets a reputation. The next case is worth more than this argument.
Then the deepest one, the Charles Moore point: the professional running the company chooses between the outcome that ends his engagement and saves the company and the outcome that extends it for three years and finishes off the company.
Save the company and be done in three months? Or choose bankruptcy and feed for three years?
It was far more profitable to put First Brands into bankruptcy than to save it, if it could have been saved.
AI Efficiency Means a Pay Cut
The technology is already here. AI document review can do in days what armies of associates do in months.
Predictive coding has been court-approved in discovery for over a decade.
So why did 14 terabytes still take an army?
Here is the part that might help to settle it.
Weil did hire the cheaper labor.
The January time entries name KLD Discovery, the contract-review vendor, over and over. And then Weil associates billed a second pass on top of it.
"2L REVIEW KLD DOCUMENTS."
"REVIEW DOCUMENTS IDENTIFIED BY KLD TEAM."
"REVIEW AND REVISE KLD DECISION LOG."
Greg Burton, at $1,510 an hour, spent January reviewing what the cheap reviewers had already reviewed.
The estate paid for the efficient solution and the expensive one.
A firm that reviews the documents in a tenth of the time bills a tenth of the money. There is no mechanism anywhere in the system that routes the savings to creditors — no competitive bidding, no fixed-fee requirement, no client with an incentive to demand it.
The economics run backward: the tool that could cut costs by 80 percent reduces the revenue of the only party in a position to deploy it.
The professionals took more out of this estate than the estate's property was worth.
And every dollar of it was legal and approved.
Part 9 examines the other guys who were hired to save the company, Alvarez and Marsal.
The other parts in this series:
Part 1 told how First Brands was destroyed and how its founder, Patrick James, was indicted.
Part 2 examined the federal case in Manhattan and the two men who admitted carrying out the fraud: Stephen Graham and Peter Andrew Brumbergs. The government’s case against James rests on them.
Part 3 examined Apollo Global Management. Apollo bought two companies that competed with First Brands. It then placed a bet that would pay if First Brands failed to pay its debts.
Part 4 examined Apollo’s credit-default bet and the man who had chaired Apollo’s board, Jay Clayton. Clayton resigned from Apollo and became the U.S. attorney whose office prosecuted Patrick James.
Part 5 described the fraud inside First Brands. Graham, the chief financial officer, and Brumbergs, the vice president of finance, fabricated invoices. They sold the same bill twice. They used shell companies to hide debt.
Part 6 examined the men who made money when First Brands fell. There were many of them. Only one man was charged with killing it. Patrick James.
What Was Lost First Brands, a Cleveland-based auto parts company, went into bankruptcy last year. It employed 26,000 people on five continents. About 6,000 of those workers were Americans in Midwestern factories. The other 20,000 were in China, Mexico, Europe, and other pl
Apollo Global Management profited from First Brands' collapse. Its former chairman now runs the office prosecuting Patrick James.
The prosecutor once chaired Apollo's board. Apollo bet against First Brands. Yet only founder Patrick James faces prison. Who killed the company?
Bankruptcy professionals billed First Brands $247 million in six months. The creditors are still waiting. The lawyers were paid first.