Panic on Wall Street continues as Lehman Brothers Inc. has fallen from ecomomic grace. Holding up the financial God on a high pedestal, when it began to come crashing down, so did thousands of its employees, customers and the stockmarket as a whole.

According to Realdealdoc.com’s John Siegler, “there is little doubt that thousands of professionals and support staff will be receiving their walking papers, consisting of severance agreements which will, of course, include general release agreements.

Siegler adds, “as background information, Barclays Capital, the investment banking division of Barclays Bank PLC (LSE:BARC), entered into a definitive lehman-bros-barclay-asset-purchase-agreement (link to official SEC filing) to acquire substantially all of the North American businesses and operating assets of Lehman Brothers Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (NYSE: LEH), and certain related assets of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and its affiliates, along with the headquarters of Lehman Brothers in New York City and two data centers located in New Jersey.”

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What was once on top of the Wall Street foodchain is slipping into the dark abyss. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 15. The filing, which lists assets of $639 billion and $613 billion in debt (ouch), names Harvey R. Miller and Shai Waisman of New York’s Weil, Gotshal & Manges as Lehman’s lawyers and only eight other lawyers so far for creditors and other parties.

In the end, the bankruptcy is likely to encompass upwards of 100 lawyers on the Lehman side and roughly thousands for the creditors, stated Evan Flaschen, a partner in the Hartford, Conn., office of Bracewell & Giuliani. In fact, Bankruptcy lawyers are already fielding calls from potential claimants to the stock brokerage firm’s assets.

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