THESE days, it’s awfully hard to get on Harvey R. Miller’s calendar.

A 75-year-old lion of the bankruptcy bar, Mr. Miller has been consumed by the largest corporate liquidation in American history: Lehman Brothers, the storied investment bank that set off one of the most harrowing episodes in the financial crisis when it collapsed in mid-September.

Mr. Miller’s workdays begin around 8 in the morning and, if he is lucky, end near 11 at night. This combative, outspoken lawyer says that some days don’t seem to end at all, but merely expand into the next, dissolving into tense meetings and complicated hearings in overheated courtrooms.

Although Mr. Miller has been involved in landmark bankruptcy cases before  including those of Eastern Airlines, R. H. Macy and Global Crossing  Lehman’s is in a class by itself because of volatile markets, continuing government investigations, the involvement of federal regulators and a possible wave of other corporate implosions.

From his perspective as Lehman’s undertaker, Mr. Miller believes that the fallout from the firm’s messy bankruptcy could have been avoided. Regulators could have stepped in, he says, not necessarily to save Lehman, perhaps, but to head off the meltdown that followed. “They totally missed it,” he says. “Look what happened.”