Erik P. Kimball

Hon. Erik P. Kimball s Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge for the Southern District of Florida in West Palm Beach, appointed in 2008 and reappointed in 2022. Prior to his appointment to the bench, he was a member of the Commercial Law and Bankruptcy Department at Hale and Dorr (now WilmerHale) in the firm’s Boston office, where he specialized in corporate bankruptcy, workouts and debt restructuring, and spent considerable time on pro bono representations of individual debtors. Judge Kimball left Hale and Dorr to become a vice president at Colonial Management Associates Inc., a Boston-based mutual fund advisor, where he oversaw all fixed-income defaults for the firm’s municipal department. Thereafter, he was a shareholder with the Florida firm Nabors, Giblin & Nickerson, P.A., where his practice focused on representing institutional investors and indenture trustees in connection with defaults of publicly traded debt securities. He later returned to Boston as a vice president in the Investment Department at Columbia Management Advisors, an affiliate of Bank of America, where he supervised all fixed-income defaults and assisted in the management of its Municipal Department. From 2003 until his judicial appointment in 2008, Judge Kimball was a shareholder at Akerman Senterfitt in the firm’s Orlando office, where he represented secured creditors, indenture trustees, institutional investors, corporate debtors and other parties in bankruptcy, receivership and debt-restructuring matters. Prior to his appointment, Judge Kimball was a member of the Board of Governors and a member of the Executive Committee of the National Federation of Municipal Analysts, an organization of more than 2,000 municipal credit analysts whose primary goal is to provide educational programs for municipal finance professionals. During his long association with the NFMA, he assisted in writing and presenting on numerous topics relevant to municipal finance. Judge Kimball is a recipient of the Denis Maguire Pro Bono Award of the Boston Bar Association. He received his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1987 and his J.D. from Boston College Law School in 1990.