Partner Emeritus
Stephen Klein leads Bennett Thrasher’s Bankruptcy & Restructuring practice. He is skilled at crisis management and helps businesses stabilize their resources and improve operations to preserve their most valuable assets. Stephen works closely with a company’s management team and with their professionals, to foster effective plans for all stakeholders. His practice includes initial evaluation, defining outcomes and implementing plans to effectuate change and impact business operations during the most difficult times. By providing diagnostic and strategic analysis, Stephen assists businesses to discover potential revenue enhancement and cost reduction, while at the same time evaluating operating cash flow.
Stephen has over 45 years of experience serving clients with complex challenges across a myriad of industries. From being appointed as Chief Restructuring Officer of one of the largest ReMax franchises experiencing bankruptcy in the country, to becoming the court-appointed Responsible Party for the Debtor-in-Possession of a large multi-location food chain – he has a depth of knowledge across business disciplines.
In 1982, along with a Board of eight others – he helped form Republic Bank. Republic grew to over $6 billion in assets and was successfully sold in a billion-dollar transaction. In the early 1990’s, Stephen founded Omni Financial Services, Inc., an Atlanta, Georgia based hard-money lender, and grew that firm to over $1 billion in assets, leading a successful NASDAQ IPO.
Early in his career, Stephen concentrated on real estate development and accumulated more than 1,000,000 square feet in commercial real estate. In the early 1970’s, he joined a regional financial consulting and insurance firm as an account executive; rising to C.F.O., President, then Chairman of the Board. As head of the firm’s restructuring division, Stephen led several restructurings, including a successful unsecured creditor’s committee restructuring of a multi-million-dollar enterprise.
Stephen earned his LL.M. from the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, summa cum laude and earned his Juris Doctor degree from John Marshall Law School, magna cum laude. His Doctoral dissertation “The Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 – 25 years later: A Closer Look” was published and has been used as reference material.
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practice areas
industry experience
education
- Master of Law, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
- Juris Doctor, John Marshall Law School
