K&L Gates Expands Restructuring Practice with Addition of Seven-Member Frankfurt Team

Berlin - The Frankfurt office of global law firm K&L Gates LLP welcomes Dr. Georg Bernsau as a partner, along with a team of six colleagues, in its restructuring and insolvency practice. The team will join K&L Gates in the coming weeks from Bernsau Brockdorff & Partner, where Bernsau was a name partner, and also includes Dr. Simone Wernicke, Harald Knittel, and Hans Beyer, as well as Nadja Raiß, Nicole Stephan, and insolvency department director Stefan Zahn.
 
The experienced team has been working in the field of reorganization, restructuring, and insolvency law for more than 25 years with a focus in restructuring-related topics. Bernsau is highly regarded for his out-of-court restructuring advice and the implementation of protective shield procedures, in addition to his appointments as insolvency administrator. Recently, Bernsau and his team were involved in the self-administration proceedings of Closurelogic GmbH and Schuhpark Fascies GmbH, which each ended with a successful restructuring via an insolvency plan. Bernsau was also responsible for self-management in the context of the insolvency of the Tectum Group. Among the well-known insolvency proceedings for which Bernsau served as insolvency administrator were Röder Präzision GmbH and Junghans Uhren GmbH.
 
At K&L Gates, Bernsau will join a financial law and M&A team with a great deal of experience advising on national and international transactions. In the restructuring area, the spectrum ranges from refinancing and rescue financing to complex cross-border restructurings and distressed M&A transactions, with the firm's full-service approach serving as a particular strength of the practice, offering clients the ability to receive comprehensive advice through a single source on restructuring, refinancing, litigation, and M&A projects in a crisis environment.
 
The addition of Bernsau and his team allows K&L Gates to better prepare for the expected increase in preventive restructuring measures in the context of the European Restructuring Directive. While advising companies and managing directors in crisis and on out-of-court restructuring has already increased significantly in recent years, a further increase in the importance of restructuring advice is expected against the backdrop of the current COVID-19 crisis, a situation with which K&L Gates is well positioned to assist clients worldwide as a result of the firm’s vast experience in rescue financing and acquisitions of shareholdings.
 
More than a dozen other new partners and of counsel also have joined K&L Gates during the first several months of 2020. These have included new lawyers in the firm’s Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Melbourne, Paris, Charlotte, Charleston, and Washington, D.C., offices across practices such as corporate, tax, health care, environment, land and natural resources, asset management and investment funds, government contracts, and investigations, enforcement and white collar.