Camisha L. Simmons, J.D., MBA, M.Ed.
Camisha L. Simmons, J.D., MBA, M.Ed. is the Founder and Managing Member of Simmons Legal PLLC, a certified woman-owned, minority-owned, and veteran-owned business transactional and civil dispute resolution and litigation law firm based in Dallas, Texas with a by-appointment office in New York, New York. She is also a Coordinating Editor of the American Bankruptcy Institute Journal’s News at 11 column, a role she has held since 2007.
Camisha is a business attorney, a restructuring and creditors’ rights attorney, a litigator, and a leading voice on emerging legal questions in the commercialization and settlement of outer space. She is licensed to practice before the bars of Texas and New York and six federal district courts across both states.
Camisha founded Simmons Legal PLLC in March 2015 after eight years at three international law firms. The firm represents debtors, creditors, lenders, investors, and other stakeholders in bankruptcy and restructuring matters, real estate and affordable housing transactions, business and commercial transactions, and civil dispute resolution and litigation.
In 2026, Simmons Legal PLLC was ranked in the Chambers USA Texas Spotlight Guide 2026 and named to Best Lawyers’ Best Law Firms for Bankruptcy and Creditor Debtor Rights / Insolvency and Reorganization Law.
Camisha is a frequent writer and speaker on cutting-edge legal issues affecting business. Over the past several years, she has built a substantial body of scholarship on the legal frameworks governing commercial activity, property rights, and insolvency in outer space, a rapidly evolving field that sits at the intersection of international law, domestic space resources legislation, and traditional principles of property, contract, and bankruptcy.
She has argued that the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act contains ambiguities that Congress should clarify, and that existing terrestrial legal doctrines — from ground leases and oil-and-gas habendum clauses to adverse possession — can supply the framework through which off-Earth territorial expansion may actually occur.
Read Building empires in the sky: Effectuating off-Earth territorial expansion using existing legal frameworks and U.S. Space Resources Law Needs Clarification by Congress. both published in The Space Review.
Camisha’s space-law scholarship also includes Houston, We Have a Problem: Bankruptcy Perspectives on Space Debris Cleanup Liability in the October 2025 American Bankruptcy Institute Journal, U.N.’s Draft Principles for Space Resource Activities Are Incongruent with U.S. Law. presented at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney in September 2025, The Final Frontier: Creditors’ Recovery of Assets in Outer Space (ABI Journal, October 2024), and Space Exploration and Production: Bankruptcy Perspectives (ABI Journal, October 2020).
As a speaker, Camisha has presented repeatedly at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference (ISDC), including Using the Metaverse to Settle Mars in Frisco, Texas in 2023, Space Settlement and Commercialization: Clarifying Private Property Rights in Los Angeles in 2024, and Repo in Space (Interplanetary Finance and Secured Transactions: Autonomous, Automated and Remote Repossession of Assets in Outer Space) in Orlando in 2025. She also delivered the Private Property Rights talk at the International Lunar Observatory Association’s Galaxy Forum in Wenchang, China, in December 2024.
She is a featured speaker at ISDC 2026 in McLean, Virginia. Listen to Camisha on The Space Show previewing her 2025 ISDC presentation and her earlier Space Show appearance on private property rights in outer space. Watch her on The Unknown Quantity discussing off-Earth territorial expansion under existing legal frameworks and on The Unknown Quantity discussing property rights and other legal issues related to outer space.
At the core of Camisha’s practice remains business bankruptcy, restructuring, and creditors’ rights. She has represented debtors, creditors, and other stakeholders in complex chapter 11 cases across industries, including oil and gas, telecommunications, continuing-care retirement communities, real estate development, and architectural-glass and aluminum manufacturing.
Beyond practice, she has published more than fifty bankruptcy-related articles in the American Bankruptcy Institute Journal, Law360, Law.com, Journal of Corporate Renewal, Pratt’s Journal of Bankruptcy Law, and the Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review, and she is a contributor to the sixth edition of the American Bar Association’s The Attorney-Client Privilege in Civil Litigation.
She has served on ABI’s Commercial and Regulatory Law Committee since 2022, currently as Co-Education Director, and previously served on ABI’s Legislation Committee from 2013 to 2019. Read Update Deep-Sea Law To Spur US Mining Projects in Law360 and Privacy Law Compliance in Bankruptcy: The EU’s New GDPR in the ABI Journal.
Before founding her firm, Camisha practiced from 2011 to 2015 at Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP (formerly Fulbright & Jaworski) in Dallas as a restructuring, finance, bankruptcy, and litigation attorney, from 2009 to 2011 at DLA Piper LLP (US) in New York as a financial restructuring and bankruptcy attorney, and from 2007 to 2009 at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in New York as a business finance and restructuring attorney.
Immediately after law school, she clerked from 2006 to 2007 for the Honorable Mary F. Walrath, who served as Chief Judge of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware from 2003 to 2008. Camisha served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of North Texas College of Law between 2015 and 2020, teaching Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, and she has served as a faculty member for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy’s Building Trial Skills training. From 2018 to 2024, she served on the Board of Directors of the Visiting Nurse Association of Texas, including as Compliance & Audit Committee Chair and Executive Committee Member between 2019 and 2024. Since 2024, she has served on the Visiting Nurse Association of Texas Foundation Board.
Camisha earned her J.D., magna cum laude, from Texas Tech University School of Law in 2006, where she served on the Texas Tech Law Review, was inducted into Phi Delta Phi and the national honorary Order of Barristers, and received the American Bankruptcy Institute’s Medal of Excellence in Bankruptcy. She earned her MBA from Texas Tech University – Rawls College of Business in 2006, her M.Ed. in Counseling and Personnel Services from the University of Maryland in 2003, and her BBA from Campbell University in 2000.
Before her legal career, Camisha served on active duty in the United States Army from 1999 to 2003 as a Noncommissioned Officer in the Adjutant General Corps, stationed in Schwetzingen, Germany and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Camisha has been recognized as one of The Best Lawyers in America® for Bankruptcy and Creditor Debtor Rights / Insolvency and Reorganization Law continuously from 2024 through 2026, as a Texas Super Lawyer and New York Metro Super Lawyer by Thomson Reuters’ Super Lawyers® rating service every year from 2021 through 2025, as one of D Magazine’s Best Lawyers in Dallas for Bankruptcy & Workout in 2025, as a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation (elected in 2021), and as one of The National Black Lawyers Top 100 in Texas from 2019 through 2025.
She was also named to Texas Lawyer’s inaugural Legal Leaders on the Rise list in 2013, as one of the Texas Diversity Council’s Top 50 Women Lawyers in Dallas in 2018, and completed the Dallas Bar Association’s DBA WE LEAD: Women Empowered to Lead in the Legal Profession Leadership Class of 2019.
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