American Lawyer Magazine's Tribute to Andy Steinberg

Colleagues warmly remembered aviation lawyer Andy Steinberg in an August 14 article on the American Lawyer's website. Titled "Amid AMR Merger Fight, Recalling a Jones Day Aviation Titan," the article placed last year's death of Steinberg (from complications resulting from eye cancer) in the context of merger efforts of his client, AMR Corp., the parent of American Airlines.

Early this month, the U.S. Justice Department and several states moved to block American's merger with U.S. Airways Group.

The article states,

The proposed deal, which has pulled in nearly a dozen Am Law 100 firms since US Airways and American agreed to join forces in February, would create the world's largest airline. The burden of making that merger happen now falls in large part on the antitrust lawyers advising the two airlines. For Jones Day, lead counsel to American parent AMR Corp., the assignment is all the more challenging because the firm will be without the services of aviation industry veteran Andrew Steinberg. 

Steinberg joined Jones Day as a partner in May 2008, according to sibling publication The National Law Journal. His two prior stops were the Federal Aviation Administration, which he joined as chief counsel in 2003, and the U.S. Department of Transportation, where he arrived as an assistant secretary for aviation and international affairs in 2006.  

"He wasn't religious, but Andy was Talmudic in his mastery of [aviation] law and all of its regulations, and there are a lot of them," says Jeffrey Shane, a former Hogan Lovells partner and onetime Transportation Department undersecretary—the latter job one that saw Steinberg report to him. "It wasn't unusual for him to come into my office and put on my desk a 10-page white paper he'd written on some creative way to address a particular issue. Andy had these totally original ideas all predicated on a statute."

Steinberg's obituary in the Washington Post can be found here.