Justin Winerman discusses industries facing distress in 2026 with Law360

Justin Winerman, a partner in BCLP's Finance Transactions practice, recently spoke with Law360 in an article about industries he is seeing signs of distress in.

In the article, Justin discusses the renewables and alternative energy and software as a service industries. He noted that renewables and alternative energy is a high-risk, start-up heavy industry that requires a lot of up-front capital investment.

"It's a long, long, long runway because they have to develop the product before they start making money and in the meantime, pay a high price of debt," he said to Law60. "So any ticks to the upside in terms of interest rates, that could be a problem."

Justin also noted that the rise of AI has placed a strain on software as a service, observing that it is "still fairly early innings in that industry in terms of the distress that's happening. There's a real difficulty about determining who are the winners and losers going to be, but I think what is pretty certain is there will be winners and losers."

Similarly, Justin noted the impact of AI on cryptocurrency businesses, as AI may have attracted investment that otherwise would have gone to crypto.

"When prices go down, what happens is there's less trading, which means there's less exchange volume for companies to make profits off for a lot of these companies, and the industry seems to generally perform weaker," he said.