After surviving the Johns Hopkins University and a near-brush as a future academic through a Searle Fellowship at the University of Chicago, Steven Klenda ended his career as a “professional student” by graduating from Northwestern University Law School in 1997 and returning home to Colorado. Technically speaking, his practice emphasizes commercial litigation and appeals, with a personal soft-spot for cases that involve First Amendment and campaign-finance issues. Practically speaking, Steve helps clients solve problems and fights for them in court and on appeal when either the opposition or a court departs from being fair or reasonable.

Steve has represented creditors, investors, and occasionally a corporate debtor, in bankruptcy courts from the Southern District of New York to Colorado. In a prior role as a General Counsel for a regional broker dealer, he also parried numerous requests about investment-related bankruptcy issues from hedge funds and other institutional investors, and negotiated multiple distressed-debt and other distressed-investment transactions under Loan Syndication and Trading Association and similar standard protocols. Notable results include vacating an arbitration award that required a health-care network to reinstate a doctor who had stolen from patients because the award violated public policy; reversing a bankruptcy-court’s confirmation of a chapter 11 plan because no fact in an extensive record supported the plan’s feasibility; and, most-recently, convincing the Colorado Supreme Court to strike the title of proposed 2009-10 Initiative #91 as violating the single-subject rule.

Steve’s family has been in Colorado for five generations and he considers Crested Butte his home. He has been practicing with the Hackstaff Law Group, LLC, since the summer of 2010.