🔒Crafty Mayr helps bondholders rebuild value

A horrific tragedy led Kurt Mayr into law.

He was 10, sitting with his brother and sister in the family car that his father had pulled over on a New Hampshire highway after a mechanical problem on their way skiing. His father, also Kurt, got out to see what was wrong. An 18-wheeler, whose driver had dozed off, struck and killed him, narrowly missing the car.

“I'm literally here by a matter of inches,” said Mayr, 43.

He remembers seeing lawyers after the accident and felt they were helping the family.

“It just registered at the time, 'Well, maybe I'll do something to help out other people, maybe I'll be a lawyer some day,' ” he said. “I just never got off that course.”

Mayr last month was named managing partner of Bracewell & Giuliani LLP's Connecticut office, which he joined in 2006.

Mayr is a financial restructuring attorney in the Houston-based firm's financial restructuring group and typically represents creditors.

The Burlington, Vt., native graduated first in his class at Villanova University School of Law. He intended to return to Burlington to practice, but professors advised otherwise, urging him to go to a New York firm and later to Vermont, not vice versa.

He listened and worked six years as an associate in the New York office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP after serving a year as law clerk to Judge Walter K. Stapleton in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Wilmington, Del.

Mayr represents clients in domestic and international restructuring and insolvency cases, largely representing bondholders in out-of-court workouts and Chapter 11 proceedings.

“I refer to my work more as restructuring than bankruptcy because literally half of what I do gets done completely out of court,” Mayr said. “Bankruptcy is sort of a subsidiary way of getting to a financial restructuring and sometimes you need it, sometimes you can't avoid it, but about half the time we're able to find a financing solution that gets done through an exchange offer or some sort of asset sale outside of court.”

It's interesting work, he said. Case in point: He represented bondholders for tribal casino operators Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, when Foxwoods was in default and not paying creditors and Mohegan Sun was seeking debt refinancing to avoid default. Mohegan avoided default and Mayr represented all bondholders in an exchange offer refinancing the debt. The Foxwoods deal, in which he represented one tranche of bonds, also was resolved through an exchange offer.

Creditors holding government debt in financially troubled Puerto Rico just hired the firm and Mayr specifically. He has a tie to the island — his wife, Abigail, is of Puerto Rican descent. She grew up in New York, but her parents own a home in Puerto Rico, where the Mayr family vacations, “so I want to see the island recover,” he said.

Abigail also is a lawyer, but not practicing while she raises the couple's daughters, Isabella, 9, and Alexandra, 3.

“One of my favorite moments with my 9-year-old was when we played Monopoly for the first time,” Mayr said, responding to a comment about the complexity of his work. “She mortgaged and mortgaged and mortgaged and she got to the point where she didn't have any money anymore. … I said, 'Now you get to see what I do for a living. You borrowed too much, now let's talk about this, you want to sell that house, that property, that's a distressed asset sale.' The look on her face was precious because it clicked. She was like, 'OK, people run out of money, then they call Daddy.' ”

Mayr's daughters benefit from his woodworking hobby. He built a playhouse at their second home in Brattleboro, Vt., and at their home in Glastonbury. The one here is 10-by-12 feet and tall enough for Mayr, who's 6-4, to stand in — an important design component when he's asked to come inside to play.

Mayr also crafts furniture, boxes and picture frames in shops at each home.

“It's my mental-health moment, when I can just sort of make things with my hands and make sense of all that happened during the week,” he said.