Force of One

Amy Denton Mayer, the newest member of Berger Singerman’s bankruptcy reorganization team, might not have the biggest office at the firm’s Tampa headquarters, but she says she has the best view—looking out over Davis Islands through floor-to-ceiling spans of window. Her keepsakes are the usual ones: framed college and law school diplomas, legal awards, photos of her daughters. And then there’s the first board she broke on her way to becoming a second-degree black belt in taekwondo. 

That board leans against a 2-foot-tall trophy she won at a state sparring competition. In the credenza next to it, she keeps “a whole plethora” of taekwondo medals and ribbons hidden from view. “I did not want my office to look like a taekwondo tournament threw up everywhere,” she says. 

It’s tempting to look for an analogy between the martial arts and her practice. Maybe “fighting spirit.” But bankruptcy law isn’t really about defeating an opponent. It’s about trying to find a way for all sides to win. And that, says U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Catherine Peek McEwen in Florida’s Middle District, is where Mayer excels.

“When I see her in a case,” McEwen says, “I know she’s going to bring together the different constituencies in a way that it will work out and we will not have to spend a whole lot of case time with hearings that involve consternation and disputes and things like that.” 

Mayer wears a lot of hats. She represents debtors. She represents creditors. And, for the last five years, she’s served as a Subchapter V trustee, a mediator who sometimes has to crack the whip, a restructuring analyst diagnosing root cause, and an alchemist trying to find gold in the ashes of a company teetering toward collapse. 

“My job is not to kill the debtor,” says Mayer. “Sometimes you have to take a hard line based on what the statute says or the case law says, but the goal is to be a problem solver and solve all the business, financial and legal issues.”

BPI Sports is a good example. 

The Hollywood, Florida, company, which makes and markets nutrition and dietary supplements, accumulated more than $8 million in debt, most of it with its primary contract manufacturer, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals (HTP). Mayer served as local counsel for HTP. 

Nobody wanted BPI to fail, especially not HTP. So Mayer helped devise a three-pronged strategy to save it. 

First, she says, they had to get BPI under what was then the Subchapter V debt cap of $7.5 million (now $3.4 million). HTP “forgave just enough to get them under the debt limit.” 

Then HTP gave BPI a “pre-petition secured loan to fund the cost of administration and operations” during the Subchapter V proceedings.

Finally, a debt-for-equity swap was arranged in which HTP acquired BPI in a “vertical integration that made sense for everybody,” Mayer says. “They stayed in business and the employees kept their jobs and they’re still based in South Florida.”

Mike Dal Lago, founder of Dal Lago Law in Naples, has been on the opposite side of Mayer in bankruptcy cases multiple times. “She is by far one of the most well-respected practitioners because of her knowledge of the bankruptcy code and because of her knowledge of how bankruptcy is supposed to work,” he says. 

Hearing that, it might seem surprising that she arrived at bankruptcy law—taekwondo, too—by pure chance, but at a dead run. 

Mayer graduated from high school at age 16, after skipping two grades, and dove right into college. She got her B.S. in accounting at 19, then finished her master’s and got her CPA certification at 20—a major chosen, she says, mostly because of her mom.

“I was told—not asked, told—as a high school student: ‘Pick up a newspaper. All of the jobs are in accounting, and that’s what you should major in. I’m an accountant and my two brothers are accountants.’ That was my mom’s pitch, and I kind of said, ‘OK.’”

Luckily, Mayer had an affinity. 

“It sort of came easy to me,” she says. “I liked the tax stuff and thought I was going to be an auditor.”

Until one of her accounting professors told her she “muddied the water on issues that were supposed to be black and white for the courses he was teaching and made them gray. And that the accountants in the class didn’t like it and I shouldn’t do that. Instead, I should go to law school.

“I said, ‘That sounds terrible,’” she recalls. “I didn’t really want to be a lawyer.”

There were no lawyers in her immediate family to consult. 

Her mom worked in executive accounting positions at colleges in Virginia, where Mayer was born, and in Florida. Her dad’s career, selling yachts to dealers, was the reason they moved south.

Nonetheless, she applied to law school—one law school. “My view of the world was: If it was meant to be, I’d get in; and if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t.”

She entered law school at the University of Florida in January 2000 and finished in December 2002, including a summer internship with not one, but two bankruptcy judges. 

“I was in a hurry in life,” she says. “I will never forget my uncle, my mom’s brother, he said, ‘I understand you’re in a hurry and you have all these big dreams and goals, but you need to stop and smell the roses and sort of enjoy the present.’” She pauses. “I’ve always struggled to do that, candidly.”

There were still many paths to choose from. 

“Part of me wanted to become an FBI analyst doing white-collar and organized crime investigations,” she says. “I wanted the gun, the badge, the whole deal.” The dealbreaker, though, came when she realized that working for the FBI included the prospect of “being sent to the ends of the Earth in the last place that you want to live.”

Second choice: “I thought I was going to marry the accounting with the law and become a tax lawyer.” Then she took her one and only tax course. “It was so awful. I did a drop during the first two weeks out of the tax course and just fell into the bankruptcy course elective.”

That led to a bankruptcy court internship, where Mayer discovered she wasn’t like the other interns. “When court ended at 4, they’d go home. I’m just not wired that way. I’m not necessarily the smartest person in the room, but I will outwork everybody in the room.”

Once, when the judge she was interning for took a matter under advisement, Mayer jumped in and asked, “Judge, can I take a stab at the opinion? 

“He took a pause and he looked at me like I had four heads, because I’m sure most interns, maybe no intern, had ever asked.”

But he agreed. Mayer stayed late at night for weeks crafting her draft. “I think that experience led him to becoming my biggest advocate.”

The judge connected her with what is now Stichter, Riedel, Blain & Postler, in Tampa, among others.   

“Stichter Riedel was not the most lucrative offer that I had on the table,” she says, but again, Mom offered advice. “They had incredibly low turnover. Their people don’t leave. … My mom had managed people for a long time. She said the lack of turnover was more telling.”

Mayer stayed with the firm for 22 years, rising from associate to shareholder. “Harley [Riedel] became a father figure to me. I became very close to his mother, Margaret, who lived down the street from me.” 

So close, in fact, that one of the few decorations on her office wall is a painting Margaret created just for Mayer, of a pond and two small girls.

Along the way, she built friendships. She built experience. She handled debtors and creditors in industries ranging from massive agricultural operations to neighborhood coffee shops, navigated the delicate balance between DEA regulations and insurance payment delays pushing a pharmacy toward failure, and established enduring legal precedent in a landmark Subchapter V bankruptcy.

That last one involved a Tampa-based underground utilities and infrastructure contractor, McKenzie Contracting, facing $8 million in creditor claims, putting it over the debt limit for Subchapter V. But more than $1.6 million of that involved merchant cash advances. Mayer, representing McKenzie, argued the MCAs should be excluded from her client’s total debt. The judge agreed that, since the disputed claims were filed as “sales of future receipts,” the debt was contingent and should not count toward the debt limit. The ruling became a tool for determining Subchapter V eligibility in similar bankruptcies. 

“Even if I hadn’t gotten paid, I would have completed the work, because I wanted to make law,” Mayer says.

It was Riedel who encouraged her to become a Subchapter V trustee in the fall of 2019, as the addition to the bankruptcy code was enacted. “He had the foresight to know that it was the right blend between accounting and law for me.”

Aimed at speeding and simplifying Chapter 11 restructuring in order to reduce costs for small businesses, Subchapter V sets a strict 90-day deadline for filing a reorganization plan. The goal is to keep the business running whenever possible, rather than allowing the process to drag on and incur potentially devastating legal fees and administrative costs. 

“I’ve had cases get filed where, day one, I see this case come in and it’s a business divorce and it’s ugly. And there’s going to be months of litigation and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in admin claims. And the debtor doesn’t have two nickels to rub together to afford that,” Mayer says. “I don’t wait. I jump in and I call both lawyers and say, ‘We’re going to do a mediation. We can do it in person. We can do it via Zoom, but we’re going to put this to bed.”

It’s not just for the benefit of the parties. 

“I don’t just have a duty to do that because it’s my job,” Mayer says. “I have a duty to the judges to minimize the burden on their docket from massive amounts of contested matters and adversary proceedings that are a waste of everybody’s time and resources in cases that can’t afford it anyway.”

Having a CPA background gives her a valuable frame of reference, which certainly must factor into why she’s one of the busiest trustees in the busiest Subchapter V district in the country. In the five years since she began, she’s handled more than 140 Subchapter V cases—in addition to her caseload as debtor or creditor counsel. 

Last summer, Mayer joined Berger Singerman as a partner. “There are definitely industry-specific issues, and having the Berger team that’s diverse allows me to fill those gaps when it’s not my area of expertise.”

That proved true in one of her first cases after joining the firm. 

It involved a company that provided cloud-based medical and dental billing and prescription-writing technology. When it filed Chapter 11, iCoreConnect faced some $10 million in debt. Mayer turned to another Berger Singerman partner for help with IP issues as she crafted a plan that maintained seamless operations for the doctors and dentists relying on it while the company’s assets were sold. 

“It was getting people to understand that the assets are the service,” Mayer says, “and that, if you can keep that working, and if you sell those pieces off, then everybody could get their money back.”

In the end, the company was acquired by Standard Dental for nearly $11.9 million, creditors received meaningful returns, “and all of the employees transferred over from iCore to Standard Dental,” she says. “Definitely a win-win all the way around.”

Which, unlike taekwondo, is the sweetest victory.

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In Self-Defense

“When I first met Amy decades ago,” says her friend and mentor, bankruptcy attorney Roy Kobert with Roy Kobert Mediation, “she told me that she could roundhouse-kick an apple off the top of my head. Amy’s word is her bond. I never doubted her.”

Mayer is a second-degree black belt in taekwondo, ranked at one time among the top 10 women worldwide in sparring and forms.

She started because her younger brother was taking classes with a husband-and-wife team, Laura and David Kowkabany. Mayer was his designated chauffeur. She spent most of her time studying while he practiced. Until the Kowkabanys invited her to a free self-defense clinic. 

It was love at first kihap.

“The idea of using your voice to project and defend yourself opened so many doors to confidence—confidence in public speaking,” Mayer says. “It really was the turning point for me.”

She trained five days a week, moved up in rank, competed and won. A lot. In 2006, life got in the way. Marriage. Babies. Motherhood. She got back to taekwondo in 2015, competed again and won again. Now, though, she says she’s much more into weightlifting. Still …

“I love my job, but people have asked me, if you won the lottery tomorrow, what would you do? I’d buy the Kowkabanys’ school from them and I would do that full time.”