Hannah Crawford says she’s the busiest she’s ever been. And given we’ve not even hit full-blown recession, one imagines the workload will rise even further for Kirkland & Ellis’s latest restructuring star. 2022 was a year of crypto fallouts and Kirkland’s impressive US teams have been hoovering up a ton of work to have arisen from that. But the first big crypto collapse to have gone through the courts was Celsius, and that had huge UK implications. Here, Crawford has come into her own. Not a crypto lawyer at heart, she now has indispensable knowledge of one of the world’s most volatile, but also potentially lucrative, asset classes. More crypto opportunities are likely to land her way.
A member of Kirkland’s Women Committee, Crawford was also invited to join a new mentoring scheme for the International Women’s Insolvency and Restructuring Confederation (IWIRC). Other deals have seen her guide commodities business Noble through a $1.3bn restructuring, as well as work on the first use of the Spanish Restructuring Plan procedure for manufacturer Celsa. That’s a successful first year as a partner for Crawford.