Gabriel Olivera

GABRIEL is a counsel at O’Melveny & Myers LLP and focuses on advising clients on financial reorganizations. He combines his restructuring experience with his Spanish-speaking ability to help bridge language and cultural barriers with Latin American clients involved in complex financial restructurings. He has extensive experience in corporate and municipal bankruptcy-related matters, and has represented debtors, creditors’ committees, bondholders, directors and officers, and other parties-in-interest in some of the most well-known bankruptcy matters. He is currently part of the O’Melveny team helping the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority restructure its over $10 billion in obligations. Prior to entering private practice, he was a judicial law clerk at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Puerto Rico.

Admitted to practice in New York, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and New Jersey, Gabriel has participated in numerous fellowships. He was selected for the 2020 New York City Bar’s Associate Leadership Institute fellowship, the 2021 NCBJ Blackshear Presidential Fellowship for minority bankruptcy attorneys and the 2022 International Insolvency Institute’s NextGen Leadership Program, and he participated in the 2023 NCBJ NextGen program. His proudest moment was being part of the team that closed the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s restructuring after five years of negotiations. The restructuring resulted in a reduction of their client’s total debt by ~78%, from ~$34 billion to ~$7.4 billion.

A native of Puerto Rico, Gabriel does everything he can to mentor and encourage the inclusion of minority, and especially Hispanic, attorneys in Big Law. At his firm, he serves as the New York office’s representative for the firmwide Organization of Latinx Employees, and he is a liaison between partners and associates/counsel in the New York office’s Associate and Counsel Advisory Committee. He also is a key member of the New York office’s summer associate committee. In addition, he is engaged in a variety of pro bono work, including as an active participant in staffing a nonpartisan hotline to assist voters during the 2020 election, and as a member of the O’Melveny teams that worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to monitor various sites to identify voting rights issues and violations and to challenge significant hurdles to voting throughout Alabama during the 2020 election. Outside of the office, he has mentored high school students in the New Jersey Law & Education Empowerment Project, which empowers urban youth to perform at high academic levels.