Experienced Client-Focused Debt Lawyer Joins Sullivan & Worcester, NY

Jennifer sullivanlaw

Powered by LawFuelJENNIFER PASTARNACK JOINS SULLIVAN IN NEW YORK TO HEAD THE FIRM’S GLOBAL DEBT AND CLAIMS TRADING PRACTICE

New York City and Boston, February 4, 2020 – International law firm Sullivan & Worcester announced today that Jennifer Pastarnack has joined the firm as a partner to lead its firmwide Global Debt and Claims Trading practice in New York, expanding Sullivan’s offerings of corporate, bankruptcy and restructuring services in the United States and in London.

“At Sullivan, client relationships are at the core of our success. Jennifer brings that same client-focused, value-driven mentality to her practice.  She has tremendous experience in a specialized area of the markets our domestic and international clients are interested in,” said Joel Carpenter, managing partner of the firm. “She is a great fit and we’re pleased that she’s chosen Sullivan as her new professional home.”

Pastarnack works with hedge funds, investment banks and asset managers in trading the debt of financially distressed companies in domestic and cross-border transactions in the secondary market. She is well-versed in all aspects of the investment life cycle for claim trades including diligence reviews, claim evaluation and structuring, and has provided counsel on a broad mix of complex regulatory, legal and commercial matters, including U.S. federal securities laws. She joins Sullivan from Clifford Chance, prior to that she was with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel.

“Sullivan has the dynamic platform I wanted for the next stage of my career,” Pastarnack said. “The firm has outstanding legal talent, is an entrepreneurial, forward-thinking organization, and recognizes the importance of investing in technology to better serve our clients.”

Sullivan is a member of the Loan Syndications and Trading Association, Inc., the trade association for the U.S. debt industry, and the Loan Market Association, the trade association for the European debt trading industry. Pastarnack will be working closely the firm’s Chambers-ranked Bankruptcy & Restructuring group.

“Jennifer is an excellent lawyer whose experience in the debt and claims trading area is unique among our peers and will allow us to expand the services we provide to our existing fund and bankruptcy clients,” said Jeffrey Gleit, head of the Bankruptcy & Restructuring group.

As a pro bono advocate, Pastarnack successfully co-represented a client in a Special Immigration Juvenile Status immigration case in Brooklyn Family Court.  In October 2019, she published an article in the New York Law Journal entitled “Bankruptcy Trade Claim Market: The Dangers of Claim Trading Platforms and Automated Contracts” and was featured in a lengthy Corporate Counsel Business Journal article in May, 2019, that shared Jennifer’s unique approach to client relationships and business generation. Pastarnack earned her J.D. cum laude at New York Law School and received her B.S. from Cornell University in Labor and Industrial Relations.

About Sullivan

Sullivan & Worcester (Sullivan) is a leading AmLaw 200 law firm.  With over 200 attorneys in Boston, London, New York, Tel Aviv and Washington, DC, they guide organizations that are rewriting the rules. Sullivan’s clients, including Fortune 500 companies and emerging businesses, rely on Sullivan’s strategic vision, comfort with complexity and intense focus on results. ZAG / Sullivan & Worcester (formerly ZAG-S&W) — a joint venture between Israel-based Zysman, Aharoni, Gayer & Co. and Sullivan & Worcester LLP — provides counsel to Israel-based companies and U.S. companies with Israeli interests on a variety of legal matters including access to capital markets, international tech IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, and tax. For more information please visit sullivanlaw.com.

Recent LawFuel Headlines

  • White & Case Hits $3.6bn — And It’s Just Getting Warmed Up
    White & Case has delivered another record-breaking year, posting an 8.5% revenue increase for 2025 to reach $3.6 billion Legal Business — and signalling loudly that this is very much… Read more: White & Case Hits $3.6bn — And It’s Just Getting Warmed Up
  • $11 Million a Partner -The Big Law Pay Story That Makes Every Other Firm’s Numbers Look Modest
    Kirkland & Ellis just changed the frame for the entire industry If you write about lawyers for long enough, you make a quiet peace with the gap between your pay packet and theirs. This week, however, Kirkland & Ellis has made that gap feel almost cosmic. Equity partners at the world’s highest-grossing law firm averaged $11.1 million each for 2025 – a 20% increase on 2024. The major money figure places Kirkland’s partners in the earnings bracket of a top Premier League footballer, at roughly £22,500 a day. The firm simultaneously became the first law firm in history to break $10 billion in revenue, posting $10.56 billion for the year.
  • The Private Equity Lawyer Who Will Run Weil Gotshal
    When Weil, Gotshal & Manges announced last week that Ramona Y. Nee will succeed Barry Wolf as Executive Partner from January 2027, the news landed with the quiet inevitability of a deal that everyone saw coming. Wolf, who has steered the firm for 16 years, called her “uniquely suited.” He was not exaggerating. For nearly a quarter-century Nee has been the quiet engine of Weil’s U.S. private equity practice and the beating heart of its Boston office. Now the firm is handing her the keys.
  • Is This The Billable Hour’s Last Stand? Anthropic’s Top Lawyer Thinks So
    The legal profession has survived recessions, regulatory upheavals and the occasional partner meltdown. But the next threat to BigLaw’s favourite revenue model may come from something far less dramatic. A machine that reads faster than any associate and which could spell the end of the infamous ‘billable hour’, which has been touted as being in its end time for some time. According to Jeff Bleich, general counsel at AI company Anthropic, (pictured) the traditional billable hour could soon be on borrowed time.
  • DLA Piper Makes A Big Bet By Ditching the Verein for a New Global Structure
    Updated 16 March with clarification on the DLAPiper profit pool arrangements following the restructuring.For years, the Swiss verein has been BigLaw’s favourite legal fiction as a neat way for sprawling… Read more: DLA Piper Makes A Big Bet By Ditching the Verein for a New Global Structure
  • Billable Hours vs. Billion‑Dollar Bots – Legora and the New Economics of Law
    A two‑year‑old Swedish startup has just become one of the most valuable legal tech businesses on the planet—and it is using that war chest to plant its flag squarely in the US legal market. Legora’s $550 million Series D at a $5.55 billion valuation is not just another exuberant AI round; it is a blunt message to law firm leaders that the window for treating AI as a side project has closed. Legora’s pitch is disarmingly simple. Built on top of large language models, its platform targets the work that eats most of a junior lawyer’s life: research, document review, contract drafting and due diligence. The company claims tens of thousands of legal professionals using the product daily, across some 800 customers in more than 50 markets, including heavy‑hitting firms like Bird & Bird, Cleary Gottlieb, White & Case, Linklaters, Goodwin, Dentons and advisers such as Deloitte.
  • Big Law’s Trump Reprieve Lasts Less Than 24 Hours — The U-Turn That Changed Everything
    It has been a year — twelve months of watching the most powerful law firms on the planet twist in the wind at the pleasure of a sitting president. And just when it looked like the drama had finally resolved itself, Washington reminded everyone that in this administration, nothing is ever quite over. On Monday, the Trump administration quietly announced it was abandoning its executive orders against Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey — four firms that had the nerve, and the litigation chops, to fight back. All four had beaten the orders in the lower courts.
  • Is This The Death of Lockstep Pay for BigLaw?
    For decades, BigLaw partnership compensation had the reassuring predictability of a Swiss watch. Progress through lockstep. Accumulate seniority. Collect your reward. Repeat. That model isn’t dead. But the announcement in February 2026 that Freshfields, the world’s 13th largest firm by gross revenue, and an institution that maintained an all-equity partnership for its entire existence, was introducing a nonequity partner tier while simultaneously stretching its lockstep to reward higher earners at the top of the pay scale, made something abundantly clear. The Pay Reset is Now Freshfields isn’t alone. Cravath created a salaried partner tier in November 2023, and that move gave other highly-ranked firms permission to follow suit — Paul Weiss, WilmerHale, Cleary, Skadden, Debevoise, and Sullivan & Cromwell have all introduced nonequity tiers in the two years since.
  • Macfarlanes’ Curious New York Move: A Manhattan Office With No U.S. Law
    Macfarlanes Opens Manhattan Office – With a Deliberately Limited MissionMacfarlanes is joining the steady procession of London firms establishing a presence in New York. But unlike the usual BigLaw expansion… Read more: Macfarlanes’ Curious New York Move: A Manhattan Office With No U.S. Law


Scroll to Top

Log in to read this post

We'll email you a magic code to log you in without a password.