On Thursday, the Supreme Court overturned the multi-billion-dollar settlement agreement that Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy estate had struck between the Sackler family, the firm’s billionaire former owners, who agreed to pay $6 billion to opioid victims in exchange for full immunity from any future civil lawsuits.

Even for a busy lawyer at a big corporate law firm, billing close to 11 hours a day on a single case, five days a week for 18 months straight is no easy feat. That's the average pace Brian Glueckstein has kept up as one of the lead lawyers in the FTX bankruptcy since it began in November 2022, according to court records though April. All those hours — including 342 in December 2022 alone — have helped his law firm Sullivan & Cromwell amass close to $200 million in billings as debtor's counsel in the sprawling case so far.

The immediate impact of the wife of Antonio Pierce filing for bankruptcy will be to help the couple temporarily pause the legal process of addressing substantial debt resulting from judgments against the Raiders coach, experts said.

David Boies, one of the country’s best-known lawyers, charges more than $2,000 an hour and at age 83 can have his pick of cases. This raises a question as to why he would defend disgraced former bankruptcy judge David R. Jones, who is fighting lawsuits that allege he benefited from a personal relationship with a lawyer who worked on cases in his court.

On a mild Houston day in March 2021, Judge Marvin Isgur prepared to oversee the only case on his docket that morning. It was a motion to recuse his longtime colleague on the bench, David Jones, from a case involving a bankrupt engineering company.

In Houston’s close-knit bankruptcy court, judges David R. Jones and Marvin Isgur often stood in lockstep. Former law partners, they transformed Houston from a backwater into a boomtown for high-dollar bankruptcies.

Fenwick & West lawyers were “directly involved” in FTX’s efforts to blur its relationship with a sister hedge fund before the massive crypto exchange went bust, according to a court approved examiner.

If you had to go into debt in recent years — whether it was because of overspending on your credit cards or due to unforeseen events like medical emergencies — getting out of that hole is now particularly difficult due to high interest rates. And, as the costs for essentials like housing, cars, insurance and food keep going up due to inflation, many people have been struggling to pay their bills. That can also lead to debt and make it harder to pay off previous balances.