Valuation is a critical and indispensable part of the bankruptcy process. How collateral and other estate assets (and even creditor claims) are valued will determine a wide range of issues, from a secured creditor’s right to adequate protection, postpetition interest, or relief from the automatic stay to a proposed chapter 11 plan’s satisfaction of the “best interests” test or whether a “cram-down” plan can be confirmed despite the objections of dissenting creditors. Depending on the context, bankruptcy courts rely on a wide variety of standards to value estate assets, including retail, wholesale, liquidation, forced sale, going-concern, or reorganization value. Certain assets, however, may be especially difficult to value because valuation depends on factors that may be difficult to quantify, such as the likelihood of success in litigating estate causes of action.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit recently addressed this issue in In re Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, Ltd., 956 F.3d 1 (1st Cir. 2020) (“MMA Railway”). The First Circuit affirmed a ruling that a secured creditor failed to satisfy its burden of establishing that collateral in the form of indemnification claims settled by the estate had any value entitled to adequate protection. According to the court, with respect to a disputed claim, a showing of possible damages is not enough. Instead, the creditor must establish the likely validity of the claim and the likelihood of recovery.
MMA Railway is a cautionary tale for secured creditors. Creditors bear the ultimate burden of proof in establishing the value of their collateral under section 506(a) of the Bankruptcy Code—a determination that has important consequences in many contexts in a bankruptcy case. The First Circuit’s ruling highlights the importance of building a strong evidentiary record to support valuation. It also indicates that certain types of collateral (e.g., disputed litigation claims) are more difficult to value than others.
By Tomas Richter (Clifford Chance) and Adrian Thery (Garrigues)
Tomas RichterAdrian Thery
Under EU Directive 2019/1023 promulgated in June 2019, the 27 Member States of the European Union must enact rules supporting preventive restructurings of businesses threatened by insolvency. The restructuring frameworks to be enacted are in a large part modelled after the U.S. Chapter 11 yet they are not carbon copies of it. Also, the 27 Member States have widely differing insolvency laws against whose background the preventive restructuring frameworks must operate, and significantly diverging institutions by which they will have to be applied. The implementation tasks will be both varied and formidable.
However, certain threshold questions are very similar across jurisdictions when it comes to particular topics relevant to corporate restructurings. In the context of agreeing to and adopting a restructuring plan, some of the key questions arise in relation to classification of investors’ claims and interests, grouping these claims and interests into classes, voting in the classes, and obtaining an official approval of the restructuring plan after investors have expressed their opinions on it via the voting mechanism.
The purpose of this first guidance note, published by INSOL Europe, is to flag some of the key issues that national legislators will want to consider in this particular context when implementing the restructuring frameworks prescribed by Title II of the Directive, and, at least at times, also to respectfully suggest which approaches, in the authors’ humble opinions, might perhaps be explored more productively than others.
By Professor Nancy Rapoport (William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Nancy Rapoport
As someone who studies professional fees in large chapter 11 cases, I’ve thought a lot about how quickly those professional fees can escalate. Successful chapter 11 bankruptcies are expensive, though, in almost all cases, the end result—a successful reorganization—is a good result. But can the fees be controlled effectively?
I think that they can, although there are all sorts of reasons why, often, fees aren’t monitored very closely. There’s usually a disconnect between who’s paying those fees and who’s monitoring the work. In a non-bankruptcy context, a lawyer might bill a client on a monthly basis and get relatively fast feedback from the client regarding issues of reasonableness. The image that comes to mind is of a lawyer pushing a bill across a table and an experienced client pushing it back to request reductions for potentially unreasonable fees or expenses. But the process is different for fees paid to professionals in chapter 11 cases. Bankruptcy courts are charged with the responsibility of reviewing the fees and expenses for reasonableness, and the Office of the United States Trustee serves as another set of eyes, as would a fee examiner.
For estate-paid professionals, the bankruptcy court must first approve the fee applications, which then get paid either from a carveout of a secured creditor’s collateral or as administrative expenses. Imagine a typical list of estate-paid professionals: the debtor’s counsel (plus conflicts counsel and local counsel), the creditors’ committee counsel (plus conflicts counsel and local counsel), investment banks and financial advisors (often for both the debtor and the committee), along with other, more specialized counsel. All of those professionals are working at warp speed, because large chapter 11 cases are literally bet-the-company actions. The fee applications themselves can run into the thousands of pages, per professional, with the time entries showing who worked on what, and for how long, on a day-by-day basis. There’s also often a lag between the work done and the submission of the fee applications, and few actors—other than the professionals themselves and some large institutional creditors—are repeat players. If the client isn’t familiar with the rhythm of chapter 11 bankruptcies, then that client has to take the professionals’ word for whether the tasks were both reasonable and necessary. Parsing the fee applications is a complicated task.
Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting that bankruptcy professionals try to gouge the estate by performing unnecessary tasks. Far from it. The professionals whose fees I’ve reviewed have genuinely been trying to work within the reasonableness guidelines. But the staffing choices that get made—which level of professional works on which tasks, how long it takes to do the work, how many people review that work, how often all of the professionals touch base on the case’s progress, and how a professional must react to actions taken by a different professional—often don’t have the luxury, on the front end, of data-driven planning to eke out the most efficient workflows. Add to that the fact that all of these professionals worry about missing something important, and it’s not hard to see how fees can mount up.
I’ve written a lot about how to think about fees in chapter 11 cases, including these articles (here, here, and here). Most recently, I’ve been working with a co-author, Joe Tiano of Legal Decoder, to imagine a world in which big data can help professionals perform more efficiently (here and here). (Full disclosure: Legal Decoder helped me review the fees and expenses in the Toys R Us cases.) In a recent piece for the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review, I’ve taken what we know about how a company’s general counsel works with outside professionals outside bankruptcy and suggested that, in a chapter 11 context, many of those behaviors can help to control the size of the professional fees and expenses: by paying closer attention to staffing and monthly budget-to-actual reconciliations, by using legal analytics to measure efficiency, and by using artificial intelligence for certain types of tasks. The point is that paying attention to efficient behavior on the front end benefits everyone, including the professionals themselves, who won’t have to negotiate reductions of their already billed work. The ABI Law Review article is available here.
By Brook Gotberg (University of Missouri Law School; Chair, Small Business Committee of the Bankruptcy & COVID-19 Working Group)
Brook Gotberg
In the wake of the national shutdown of most commercial activity in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many small businesses are struggling with financial disruption, restrictions on reopening, and uncertainty regarding future business prospects. Small businesses make up the vast majority of private firms in the United States, and provide nearly two-thirds of all new jobs. These businesses have been the most visible economic casualties of the global pandemic, with many already closing for good, and many others reevaluating their prospects. Certain industries, particularly dining and entertainment, have been particularly hard-hit, and could face large-scale obliteration.
A group of interdisciplinary scholars, the Small Business Committee of the Bankruptcy & COVID-19 Working Group, has been meeting regularly since March to discuss policy proposals for bankruptcy that would best protect viable small businesses from unnecessary death. Although bankruptcy serves as a method to discharge debt, it also operates to stop collection efforts, which may be essential even for companies with little to no debt. We fear that many formerly profitable small businesses will unnecessarily fail in the face of the current constraints on bankruptcy protection – constraints which assume a functioning economy, not the current reality. Moreover, a mass filing of bankruptcies could overwhelm the bankruptcy system itself, particularly in light of the accelerated time frames currently designated for small businesses under the Bankruptcy Code.
We therefore recommend that the Code be temporarily adjusted to put a six-month freeze on most typical deadlines, affording debtors additional time to propose a plan of reorganization. Furthermore, we recommend that debtors be allowed an amortized schedule to repay past-due rent.
Our reasoning for this proposal is simple. While bankruptcy law in normal times can distinguish viable companies from non-viable companies and recommend reorganization or liquidation accordingly, these are not normal times. Baseline assumptions for the value of businesses depend on revenues, which are now artificially constrained. Creditors, trustees, and judges cannot make informed decisions on the viability of a given enterprise based on the recent past, and that uncertainty is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. It is therefore essential to allow bankrupt firms more time to take advantage of the automatic stay while reassessing options for reorganization.
Furthermore, the hit to revenues will likely create debt overhang for otherwise profitable businesses that could prove impossible to overcome in the short run. This is particularly true for rental obligations. For many small businesses, past-due rent is likely to be the primary obligation, but the law does not permit debtors to repay past-due rent over time, as is permitted for other forms of debt. Current bankruptcy rules require a debtor to commit to its outstanding rental agreements within 60 days of filing, and then to repay all past-due rental obligations “promptly” (see 11 U.S.C. § 365(b) and (d)(4)(A)). Our policy recommendation would permit small business debtors to repay rental obligations over the life of the plan – three to five years, under the Small Business Reorganization Act (SBRA).
Similarly, we also recommend that interest accumulated on oversecured collateral after the date of the national emergency proclamation, March 13, 2020, be disallowed in an effort to preserve the respective positions of all creditors.
Recognizing the burden placed on landlords and secured creditors by these recommendations, our proposed changes to deadlines do not interfere with swift cash collateral motions and motions to obtain alternative financing. We also recommend that, although most motions to lift the stay would not be permitted, creditors should be allowed to lift the stay in circumstances where it can be shown that the debtor is wasting or spoiling the collateral.
A simultaneous permanent closure of small businesses would be catastrophic for the American economy, as hinted at by the surge in unemployment that followed the temporary closures. Beyond the loss of jobs, closure of businesses would mean fewer services offered within the community, and closed storefronts would likely invite blight, particularly in already vulnerable communities. This could erase years of hard-won economic and social progress.
The goal of the Bankruptcy & COVID-19 Working Group is to make workable policy recommendations that will have a meaningful impact in mitigating the harm caused by COVID-19 to the American economy. The group continues to meet, gather data, and review additional policy recommendations. The goal is to minimize the long-term damage caused by the global pandemic by exploring how bankruptcy policy can do the most good.
By Benjamin Iverson (BYU Marriott School of Business), Jared A. Ellias (University of California, Hastings College of the Law), and Mark Roe (Harvard Law School)
Ben IversonJared A. ElliasMark Roe
We recently estimated the bankruptcy system’s ability to absorb an anticipated surge of financial distress among American consumers, businesses, and municipalities as a result of COVID-19.
An increase in the unemployment rate has historically been a leading indicator of the volume of bankruptcy filings that occur months later. If prior trends repeat this time, the May 2020 unemployment rate of 13.3% will lead to a substantial increase in all types of bankruptcy filings. Mitigation, governmental assistance, the unique features of the COVID-19 pandemic, and judicial triage should reduce the potential volume of bankruptcies to some extent, or make it less difficult to handle, and it is plausible that the impact of the recent unemployment spike will be smaller than history would otherwise predict. We hope this will be so. Yet, even assuming that the worst-case scenario could be averted, our analysis suggests substantial, temporary investments in the bankruptcy system may be needed.
Our model assumes that Congress would like to have enough bankruptcy judges such that the average judge would not be pressed to work more than was the case during the last bankruptcy peak in 2010, when the bankruptcy system was pressured and the public caseload figures indicate that judges worked 50 hour weeks on average.
To keep the judiciary’s workload at 2010 levels, we project that, in the worst-case scenario, the bankruptcy system could need as many as 246 temporary judges, a very large number. But even in our most optimistic model, the bankruptcy system will still need 50 additional temporary bankruptcy judgeships, as well as the continuation of all current temporary judgeships.
Our memorandum’s conclusions were endorsed by an interdisciplinary group of academics and forwarded to Congress.
By Hon. Paul W. Bonapfel (U.S. Bankruptcy Judge, N.D. Ga.)
Hon. Paul W. Bonapfel
A Guide to the Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019 is a comprehensive explanation of the new subchapter V of chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code that qualifying debtors may elect and other changes to the Bankruptcy Code that the Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019 (“SBRA”) enacted. The Guide also covers related changes to title 28 of the U.S. Code (Judiciary and Judicial Procedure) and the promulgation of Interim Bankruptcy Rules and revised Official Forms.
Among other things, the Guide discusses the new definition for ”small business debtor;” the role and duties of a subchapter V trustee; changes in procedures; provisions for the content and confirmation of a subchapter V plan (including elimination of the “absolute priority rule”); and new provisions for discharge after confirmation of a “cramdown” plan.
Since the distribution of earlier versions of the Guide prior to SBRA’s effective date (February 19, 2020) and its publication at 93 Amer. Bankr. L. J. 571, the paper has been revised and updated to include discussion of: the increase in the debt limits for eligibility for subchapter V under the CARES Act; how courts are implementing procedures for subchapter V cases; and early case law dealing with retroactive application of subchapter V, its availability in a chapter 11 case filed prior to its enactment, and the exception in new § 1190(3) to the antimodification rule in § 1123(b)(5), which prohibits the modification of a claim secured only by the debtor’s principal residence.
The latest Guide is available here. (Revised July 2020 to include Summary Comparison of U.S. Bankruptcy Code Chapter 11, 12, & 13, Key Events in the Timeline of Subchapter V Cases, and additional sources and discussion; supplemental materials added November 2020 and April 2021 in Chapters XIV and XV.)
Although the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is headquartered in Texas, it filed for chapter 11 in Delaware in February. That was permissible under existing bankruptcy venue rules because the BSA had created an affiliate in Delaware seventh months earlier. Unsettled by this apparent forum shopping, the Attorneys General of 40 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico sent a letter to Congress expressing their support for H.R. 4421, the Bankruptcy Venue Reform Act of 2019. It would have prevented the BSA’s conduct. Ten state Attorneys General did not sign the letter: New York, Delaware, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, New Jersey, North Carolina, Montana, Virginia, and Wyoming.
Under the Act, a corporation could only establish venue in three places. First, the district where its “principal assets” were located for the 180 days before filing. Second, the district where it maintains its “Principal Place of Business.” Third, and only for controlled subsidiaries, any district where a case concerning an entity controlling 50 percent or more of its voting stock is pending. Changes of control or in the Principal Place of Business in the year before filing or conducted “for the purpose of establishing venue” would be disregarded. Corporations could thus no longer manufacture venue in a preferred jurisdiction by simply creating an affiliate there.
H.R. 4421 would also require the Supreme Court to promulgate rules allowing “any attorney representing a governmental unit” to appear in any chapter 11 proceeding without paying a fee or hiring local counsel. This provision likely factored heavily into the Attorneys General’s support for the Act. Their support letter emphasizes that the resulting rule would help them enforcers consumer protection and environmental laws by reducing the costs of defending their states’ interests in chapter 11 cases filed in distant jurisdictions.
The letter offered two reasons why corporations should not be able to manufacture venue in districts with seemingly favorable judges just by creating an affiliate there. First, it is costly for creditors (particularly small creditors) because they must either travel long distances or forgo face-to-face participation as well as hire local counsel in expensive legal markets. Second, it may cause the public to perceive the bankruptcy system as unfairly advantaging large corporations. H.R. 4421 would solve these problems by “ensur[ing] that bankruptcies are filed in jurisdictions where debtors have the closest connections and filings will have the largest impacts.” The letter notes the Southern District of New York and the District of Delaware as two currently attractive districts. But the Attorneys General argue that other district and bankruptcy judges have similar expertise.
Academics largely agree that 28 U.S.C. § 1408’s permissive venue rules encourage competition among bankruptcy courts to attract high profile cases, but opinion is split on whether this competition improves or degrades bankruptcy law.
Lynn LoPucki and William Whitford argue that venue choice degrades bankruptcy law by pressuring judges to exercise their discretion to favor debtors and their attorneys because these are the actors who usually choose where to file. They suggest, for example, that bankruptcy judges of the Southern District of New York misuse discretion by freely granting extensions of the 120-day exclusivity period during which only the debtor may propose a reorganization plan. Debtors can then agree to move toward confirmation of a plan in exchange for concessions from creditors.
David Skeel, on the other hand, argues that at least one of the venue choices that the proposed Bankruptcy Reform Act would eliminate—the district where the entity is incorporated—improves bankruptcy law by encouraging states to compete for incorporation fees by offering increasingly efficient bankruptcy rules in the multiple areas where federal bankruptcy law defers to state law.
On April 29, 163 current and retired bankruptcy judges sent a letter to members of the House Committee on the Judiciary expressing support for H.R. 4421’s proposed reforms. The letter stresses the preference for eliminating state of incorporation as a basis for venue.
By Andrew N. Goldman, George W. Shuster Jr., Benjamin W. Loveland, Lauren R. Lifland (Wilmerhale LLP)
Andrew N. GoldmanGeorge W. Shuster Jr.Benjamin W. LovelandLauren R. Lifland
Valuation is a critical and indispensable element of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. It drives many aspects of a Chapter 11 case, from petition to plan confirmation, in all circumstances. It may be obvious that the COVID-19 crisis has added a layer of complexity—and volatility—to bankruptcy valuation issues with respect to valuing assets, liabilities, and claims, both in and outside the Chapter 11 context. But the crisis may also change the way that courts look at valuation determinations in Chapter 11—both value itself, and the way that value is measured, may be transformed by the COVID-19 crisis. While the full extent of the pandemic’s effect on valuation issues in bankruptcy has yet to be seen, one certainty is that debtors and creditors with a nuanced and flexible approach to these issues will fare better than those who rigidly hold on to pre-crisis precedent.
By Ben Iverson (Brigham Young University), Mark Roe (Harvard Law School)
Ben IversonMark Roe
The COVID-19 pandemic looks likely to cause a surge in bankruptcies in the United States—conceivably a surge as rapid and as substantial as the U.S. court system has ever experienced. A significant and rapid increase in judicial capacity to manage the flood of cases is more than appropriate, we argued in a recent op-ed.
Bankruptcy filings in the United States have historically peaked several months after a surge in unemployment. And American unemployment is now rising at an unprecedented rate, with more than 30 million claims filed in the last six weeks. If historical patterns hold, the bankruptcy surge would be on track to be the largest the American bankruptcy system has experienced.
Bankruptcy works well enough and quickly enough in normal times, particularly for restructuring large public firms. But it cannot work as well, and the economy will suffer, if the bankruptcy system is overloaded. Delays in critical vendor orders, DIP loan approvals, pre-packaged bankruptcy confirmations and the like could all slow commerce unnecessarily.
By Thomas J. Salerno, Gerald Weidner, Christopher Simpson, and Susan Ebner, (Stinson LLP)
Tom SalernoGerald WeidnerChris SimpsonSusan Warshaw Ebner
On March 27, 2020, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was enacted into law. The CARES Act is reported to be “twice as large as any relief ever signed,” and will provide $2.2 trillion in relief to US businesses (with another $1 trillion being promised in the near future). While bankruptcy lawyers are aware that CARES expanded the debt limitations for eligibility for the Small Business Bankruptcy Reorganization Act, there could (and should) be another substantial implication for the brave new bankruptcy world—a new potential source of DIP financing. It is in this context that the CARES financing provisions become particularly interesting.
The authors recognize that there are established underwriting guidelines for SBA loans. Moreover, the existing regulations (and revisions in process) will come into play as to availability of these loans. Accordingly, while there is no express prohibition for some of the loans referenced herein from being accessed in a Chapter 11 proceeding, a de facto prohibition likely comes from existing underwriting guidelines. If the overarching purpose of the CARES Act is to assist businesses in weathering the economic storm while the COVID 19 virus ravages the economy, the authors argue that such underwriting guidelines can, and must, be loosened in order to allow application of some of these programs in Chapter 11 proceedings so that they can be most effectively implemented to stabilize businesses, preserve jobs, continue to keep employees and businesses on the tax rolls, etc.
In this way the stimulus funds will be used where they can be most effectively deployed. If not, those funds will be the equivalent of the federal government sending rubber rafts to a drought stricken area—a sign that the government cares, perhaps, but of certainly no real use to address the problem at hand. The full article is available here.
