Heather Lennox has played a leading role in Jones Day’s representations of debtors and potential debtors, creditors’ committees, prepetition secured lenders, bank groups, DIP lenders, credit card processors, and other significant creditors in many of the nation’s largest in-court and out-of-court corporate and municipal restructurings. She has substantial experience counseling clients in fraudulent conveyance, illegal dividend, fiduciary duty, piercing the corporate veil, and mass tort issues in bankruptcy. Heather has represented entities in the structuring and consummation of spin-offs, distressed sales and acquisitions, ring-fencing transactions, and other out-of-court restructuring transactions. She is Partner-in-Charge of the Cleveland Office.

Heather has represented, among others: Peabody Energy Corp., the City of Detroit, Copperweld Corporation, CSC Industries, Dana Corporation, Fruehauf Trailer Corporation, Great American Communications Company (a prepackaged case), Hostess Brands, Inc., LTV Steel Company, Metaldyne Corporation, Oglebay Norton Company, and St. Mary’s of the Woods (a CCRC) as debtors’ counsel and significant creditors in the Delta Airlines, Forum Health, HomePlace Stores, Northwest Airlines, Pittsburgh Penguins, R.H. Macy, Southern Air Transport, United Airlines, US Airways, and Wornick Company bankruptcies.

Heather has coauthored bankruptcy-related articles published in The Business Lawyer and the Journal of Bankruptcy Law and Practice. She is listed in the Guide to the World’s Leading Insolvency and Restructuring Lawyers and is a conferee of the National Bankruptcy Conference (2012-present); a Fellow in the American College of Bankruptcy; and a member of the American Bankruptcy Institute, the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association, and the New York City Bar Association. Lawdragon 500 lists her among the “Leading Lawyers in America” (2017).

Jones Day

Jones Day traces its beginnings to the firm of Blandin & Rice, formed in Cleveland, Ohio in 1893. Edward J. Blandin was one of the most noted litigators in Cleveland; he later was elected President of the Cleveland Bar Association, becoming the first of nine Jones Day partners to be so honored. William Rice was a successful business lawyer. They took on one associate, Frank Ginn, and the Firm rapidly expanded. Tragedy struck in 1910, when Rice was mysteriously murdered while walking home from dinner. The murder was never solved.

The Firm survived this shock, and in 1913 Frank Ginn became the first of what have been only seven Managing Partners of Jones Day in the century since that time. Other successful lawyers joined the Firm, including the state’s leading utilities lawyer, Sheldon Tolles, and a leading railroad lawyer, Tom Hogsett. By 1920, Cleveland had become the fifth largest city in the United States and the home of many large industrial corporations. At that time, the Firm included in its associate ranks two future Managing Partners, Tom Jones and Jack Reavis.

Among the Firm’s most prominent clients were the Van Swearingen Brothers, who controlled the Alleghany Corporation, the Nickle Plate Railroad, the Union Trust Bank, and the Union Station and Terminal Tower complex in downtown Cleveland. John D. Rockefeller was also a significant client, and the Firm became the leading utility law firm in Ohio. It was counsel to the bank credit committee which successfully concluded the reorganization of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, characterized as “the greatest example of equity reorganization.”