Ducera Partners

Michael Kramer, the firm's CEO and founding partner, leads all major restructuring and M&A advisory mandates. He built the firm after a career at Perella Weinberg Partners and brings a distinct debtor-advisory lens to every engagement. Senior partners including Joshua Sason and Derron Slonecker share oversight of transaction execution and firm operations.

Ducera sources mandates through deep relationships with distressed debt funds, private credit managers, and corporate boards — the constituencies that hire debtor-side advisors when balance-sheet stress emerges. The firm's reputation was cemented during the Hertz and J.C. Penney bankruptcies in 2020, which generated a pipeline of repeat engagements from the restructuring community that values a boutique not conflicted by broad M&A or trading operations.

Ducera Partners is an advisory-focused investment bank, not a family office. It operates as a boutique providing M&A, restructuring, liability management, and private capital advisory services, primarily to corporations under financial stress. The firm does not invest its own balance sheet or manage third-party assets.

Ducera does not publicly exclude specific sectors, but its restructuring practice concentrates on industries with high capital intensity and cyclical balance-sheet risk — retail, energy, aviation, and telecommunications. The firm is rarely active in technology M&A or growth-equity advisory, where the pitch deck is built around revenue multiples rather than debt-capacity analysis.

Ducera's Shanghai office extends the firm's restructuring and liability management capabilities into Asia, where cross-border distressed situations often involve Chinese creditor committees and onshore regulatory complexities. The office supports both Asian restructurings and U.S.-based mandates with Asian lender exposure.

Liability management is a core competency, not an adjacent practice. Ducera advises companies and creditor groups on out-of-court exchanges, uptiering transactions, and drop-down financing structures that lie between traditional refinancings and full Chapter 11 filings. The firm's work on J.C. Penney and subsequent mandates established it as one of the few boutiques routinely retained on these highly technical, often contentious, assignments.

Yes, Ducera directly competes with the restructuring groups at PJT Partners, Lazard, and Houlihan Lokey for debtor-side mandates, particularly in retail and energy. Ducera's differentiating claim is its boutique structure — no research conflicts, no trading desk, no buy-side M&A advisory that could alienate creditor constituencies.