Katie Grainer Stenberg is a partner at Waller Lansden and serves on the firm’s Women’s Initiative. Her practice focuses on corporate restructuring, bankruptcy and commercial transactions. Ms. Stenberg has considerable experience in the areas of workouts and corporate restructurings, bond defaults, corporate trust administration, bankruptcy, creditor’s rights, commercial litigation and receiverships. She represents specialty lenders, secured creditors, creditor committees and indenture trustees in bankruptcy proceedings, financial transactions, corporate reorganizations and state and federal court litigation. Ms. Stenberg has been recognized as one of the 2009 Mid-South Rising Stars.
Currently, Ms. Stenberg represents a publicly traded specialty lender in a number of corporate restructurings, workouts and bankruptcy proceedings throughout the country. She also represents several Indenture Trustees in defaulted bond issues across the United States.
Ms. Stenberg’s corporate restructuring experience includes advising healthcare lenders in successful workouts in the senior living segment and representing Indenture Trustees in connection with several low income apartment project and nursing home defaults. She served as counsel to the senior secured lender in the Health Essentials Solutions, Inc. bankruptcy as well as the senior secured lenders and agents in the Lexington Precision, Inc. bankruptcy. Additionally, Ms. Stenberg has represented secured creditors in the successful commencement and/or completion of federal court receiverships. Ms. Stenberg assisted as Committee Counsel for the Unsecured Creditors Committee in the American Home Patient bankruptcy, in which the Committee served as co-proponent, with the debtors, of a plan paying creditors 100 cents on the dollar. The plan, approved despite strong objection, and its confirmation were upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in the first case in which the Sixth Circuit had to consider the impact of the United States Supreme Court’s Till decision. Ms. Stenberg has also represented an OEM automobile manufacturer in several bankruptcies involving its tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers.
Ms. Stenberg has also advised several clients, including the Tennessee State Lottery Board, finance and healthcare companies and equipment manufacturers, on matters of State and Federal Government procurement, program eligibility and contract administration.
Ms. Stenberg began her legal career with Waller Lansden in 2002 and then served as in-house corporate counsel for the GE-Aviation business unit of the General Electric Company, where she advised the company in domestic and international commercial transactions, Federal Government procurement, and long-term risk and revenue sharing arrangements related to commercial and military engine applications. Ms. Stenberg returned to Waller Lansden in 2006 and has since counseled foreign corporate entities in connection with revenue sharing transactions. Ms. Stenberg also regularly counsels clients on financing matters involving aircraft collateral or aviation regulatory issues.
Ms. Stenberg is a contributor to Waller Lansden’s Corporate Trust Quarterly and co-authored the article “Antitrust Concerns May Block Section 363 Sales – Bankruptcy Court Orders May Not Be As Bulletproof As They Seem” published in the TMA Journal of Corporate Renewal in May 2009. She was a panelist at InsideCounsel's 10th Annual SuperConference in 2010 speaking on the topic "The Role of the General Counsel as Counselor."
