The volume that kept climbing
Commercial Chapter 11 filings hit 2,422 in the first quarter of 2026, up from 1,764 a year earlier, a 37 percent jump, on Epiq data reported by the Baltimore Sun. April came in 42 percent ahead of the prior April. None of this started this year. Bankruptcies among large public and private companies reached 717 through November 2025, past the full-year 2024 total of 687, by S&P Global Market Intelligence's count.
The backdrop is stable in the worst way. Rates that stayed high, input-cost pressure that did not ease, trade disruption, and a consumer economy where lower- and middle-income spending keeps weakening all point to steady or rising commercial filings through 2026 and into 2027, on outlooks from PwC, Wolters Kluwer, and AO Shearman. For a practice that stared at near-zero filings during the cheap-money years of 2021 and 2022, this is a structural change, not a blip.
The shape of the docket matters as much as the size
Three sectors carried 2025. Real estate, consumer goods, and energy and industrials together made up roughly 80 percent of large Chapter 11 filings, on S&P's year-end numbers. That concentration shapes the hiring. The lawyer who runs a distressed commercial real estate case is not the lawyer who runs a consumer retail bankruptcy, and a firm staffing for the docket that actually arrived needs benches in each, not one generalist group.
The other shift is the rise of out-of-court work running alongside the filings. Distressed companies that can dodge the cost and disclosure of a formal Chapter 11 increasingly try liability-management deals and out-of-court negotiations first. For a restructuring practice that means hiring not only Chapter 11 trial talent but the corporate restructuring lawyers who can close a complex deal without ever filing.
Where the hiring is going
Demand shows up at three levels. Senior partners with active distressed real estate or consumer-retail books are being chased hard, and several have moved at premium economics from large firms to mid-market shops with cleaner conflicts. Mid-level associates with one or two real Chapter 11 cases are scarce, because the lean filing years from 2018 to 2022 produced a smaller cohort than normal. And junior associates with strong commercial-litigation backgrounds are being brought in and converted, because the practice cannot hire its way out of the mid-level shortage on its own.
In our own restructuring searches the mid-level market is the tightest we have seen in years, and offers have closed at comp and title terms that would have been hard to imagine in 2022, simply because the cohort with real Chapter 11 reps is so thin.
The partner movement underneath it
Below the broader hiring story runs a real partner-movement story, and conflicts are driving a lot of it. Big-firm restructuring practices keep hitting conflicts that block them from taking company-side mandates against existing lender clients. So senior partners are following the work to mid-market and regional firms with cleaner conflict pictures and far more origination room. Several made that move in 2025.
The structural choice we tell a mid-market firm to make before its first senior restructuring hire is to get its lender conflicts mapped and resolved first, because clean conflicts are most of what is pulling senior partners out of the big firms.
What we tell associates eyeing the practice
For an associate weighing a move into or out of restructuring in mid-2026, the macro picture is good but the real question is firm by firm. A mid-level move into a group with an active docket and a partnership track is one of the better bets on the board right now. A move into a group still staffing up against work that has not arrived is a worse bet than the headline suggests, and the difference is not always visible from outside.
The one thing we tell an associate to confirm before accepting a restructuring move is that the group has a live docket now, not a pipeline it is hoping will arrive. The conditions that produced the 2025 and 2026 filing run are not clearing on a short timeline, so the firms that built quietly through 2024 are the ones running the practice they wanted today.