Bankruptcy, Cars, Reader Polls

Deferred and Looking for a Project? Go Save the American Auto Industry

By  
on

The big news story for today, as noted in Morning Docket, is the bankruptcy filing of General Motors. Developments on the GM front are being closely covered over at our sister site, Dealbreaker (which also welcomes a new writer today).
There are some legal angles to the GM story, of course. The bankruptcy will generate lots of work for several top firms, as noted by the WSJ Law Blog and Am Law Daily.
But you don’t need a law degree to play a major role in this drama. From the New York Times:

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism. But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry….

“There was a time between Nov. 4 and mid-February when I was the only full-time member of the auto task force,” Mr. Deese, a special assistant to the president for economic policy, acknowledged recently as he hurried between his desk at the White House and the Treasury building next door. “It was a little scary.”

Maybe more than a little scary. But YLS grads students can do anything, right?
Find out how Brian Deese landed this gig, and take our reader poll asking what should be done with GM, after the jump.


Many lawyers who venture into the world of policy pay their dues at large firms first. But Deese took a different route:

Mr. Deese’s route to the auto table at the White House was anything but a straight line. He is the son of a political science professor at Boston College (his father) and an engineer who works in renewable energy (his mother). He grew up in the Boston suburb of Belmont and attended Middlebury College in Vermont. He went to Washington to work on aid issues and was quickly hired by Nancy Birdsall, a widely respected authority on the effectiveness of international aid and the founder of the Center for Global Development.

But he wanted to learn domestic issues as well, and soon ended up working as an assistant for Gene Sperling, who 17 years ago in the Clinton White House played a similar role as economic policy prodigy. Eventually, Mr. Deese headed to Yale for his law degree. But his e-mail box was constantly filled with messages from friends in Washington who were signing up to work for the Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigns. Mr. Deese chose Senator Clinton’s.

Whoops. Maybe it was loyalty to a fellow Yalie. But things worked out in the end:

On the day that the Clinton campaign ended, Mr. Deese left her concession speech and received a message on his BlackBerry from a friend in the Obama campaign urging him to sign on immediately to Mr. Obama’s team.

He resumed his policy work there, and found himself stuck in Chicago — unable to fly to Washington with his dog — as the economic crisis deepened. Finally, one night, he decided to get into his car with his dog and just started driving back to Washington. Tired, he pulled over to catch some sleep in the car.

“I slept in the parking lot of the G. M. plant in Lordstown, Ohio,” he recalled. The giant plant, opened during G.M.’s heyday in the mid-1960s, is where the Pontiac G5 is produced. Under the plan Mr. Deese worked on when he arrived in Washington, Pontiac will disappear.

“I guess that was prophetic,” he said, shaking his head.

Sponsored

Good luck to Mr. Deese, as well as all of the lawyers working on different facets of the GM bankruptcy case. They’ll need it.

Fritz Henderson Sums It Up [Dealbreaker]
The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M. [New York Times]
GM Falls; Weil to Stay Busy [WSJ Law Blog]
General Motors Files for Bankruptcy [Am Law Daily]

Sponsored

Topics