To quote friend Frank, who was in Manhattan for a bankruptcy case, "my story pales in comparison" to so many instances of real destruction and death that day (including the death on American Airlines Flight 77 of my wife's and my friend Bryan Jack, who worked at a high level in the Pentagon and was aboard that flight to go out to deliver lectures at the Naval Postgraduate College in Monterrey.
I was in Baltimore, primed and ready to file a major Chapter 11 case. I represented the parent, a large bank with financial services subsidiaries, several of which had incurred substantial liabilities, both in number and aggregate alleged amounts, constituting a mass tort situation, not personal injury and wrongful death sorts of claims but rather financial frauds alleged by a very large number of customers of those subsidiaries (at times before the client had acquired those firms in recent years).
On the model of my success the prior two years in resolving, via Chapter 11, such a situation for another financial services company (the confirmation of that earlier plan of reorganization was later affirmed in In re A.G. Financial Service Center, 395 F.3d 410 (7th Cir. 2005)), I designed a Chapter 11 for filing in a district of proper venue, the District of Maryland, targeted for September 11, 2001.
My team and our client together with the professionals who managed and represented the debtor firms gathered in a conference room that morning to touch base with the ultimate parent's management and General Counsel for final green light to file the papers later that morning. Suddenly my Blackberry lit up with emails from Susan who was communicating that New York City's World Trade Center was under attack with airliners crashing into it. I read her series of emails to everyone in conference room. We all were of course stunned.
We called the New York headquarters of the ultimate parent and spoke with Deputy General Counsel. She seemed shell-shocked, mentioning seeing jet fighters over Manhattan and the lack of good information about what was going on; and she instructed us to await instructions. We stayed stayed in the conference room until lunchtime and then slipped out to a restaurant next door which had a big screen tv on which we then saw what had been happening.
After lunch the call came from New York: the CEO of the parent had decided the cases should not be filed because he concluded that, in the circumstances of global uncertainty, the bank could not risk a misperception, somewhere around the world, that the bankruptcies of several subsidiaries (even way, way down the corporate chain) meant that the parent was financially weak. The project was cancelled. And in lieu of resolving the non-P/I mass tort claims globally, fairly, and expeditiously through the efficient process of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan, with ample funding and prompt payment pursuant to an orderly and fair claims-resolution process for the claimants, the client instead had to settle and resolve the multiple litigations, both those on file and more filed thereafter, piecemeal, in state courts situated in a certain region of the country, one lawsuit at a time, with varying, happenstance recoveries for the claimants, over a much longer period of time than the Chapter 11 would have taken in order to get dollars into the hands of claimants.
I could not fly home for five days. I went to Washington and stayed in the Arlington townhouse our older son was occupying with several other recent college graduates who were finding their first jobs in D.C. He insisted I sleep in his bed, and he slept on a pallet. One night I hosted all the housemates to dinner in a neighborhood restaurant, and during the meal, an impromptu parade of people following a guy with an American flag walked in from the street and paraded through the tables, singing "God Bless America." Everyone stood up and joined in the singing.
Let Americans never forget the attacks and the deaths of our fellow Americans, and let us never, ever countenance terrorism on behalf of any "cause," foreign and domestic.
My tale is completely insignificant in comparison to the deaths of 2,996 Americans at the hands of the terrorists on 9/11. But my experience at least indicates that the impacts and the costs of the attacks were multifarious and reverberated throughout the land and permeated everyone's lives and dealings.