Bankruptcy Grifters
by | posted in: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Corporate Governance, Jurisprudence, Third-Party Releases | 0

By Lindsey Simon (University of Georgia School of Law)

The recent decision in In re Purdue Pharma did not uphold the third-party releases in the bankruptcy court’s approved plan. This post discuss the third-party releases issue.

— Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable Editors

Lindsey Simon

Grifters take advantage of situations, latching on to others for benefits they do not deserve. Bankruptcy has many desirable benefits, especially for mass-tort defendants. Bankruptcy provides a centralized proceeding for resolving claims and a forum of last resort for many companies to aggregate and resolve mass-tort liability. For the debtor-defendant, this makes sense. A bankruptcy court’s tremendous power represents a well-considered balance between debtors who have a limited amount of money and many claimants seeking payment.

But courts have also allowed the Bankruptcy Code’s mechanisms to be used by solvent, nondebtor companies and individuals facing mass-litigation exposure. These “bankruptcy grifters” act as parasites, receiving many of the substantive and procedural benefits of a host bankruptcy, but incurring only a fraction of the associated burdens. In exchange for the protections of bankruptcy, a debtor incurs the reputational cost and substantial scrutiny mandated by the bankruptcy process. Bankruptcy grifters do not. This dynamic has become evident in a number of recent, high-profile bankruptcies filed in the wake of pending mass-tort litigation, such as the Purdue Pharma and USA Gymnastics cases.

This Article is the first to call attention to the growing prevalence of bankruptcy grifters in mass-tort cases. By charting the progression of nondebtor relief from asbestos and product-liability bankruptcies to cases arising out of the opioid epidemic and sex-abuse scandals, this Article explains how courts allowed piecemeal expansion to fundamentally change the scope of bankruptcy protections. This Article proposes specific procedural and substantive safeguards that would deter bankruptcy-grifter opportunism and increase transparency, thereby protecting victims as well as the bankruptcy process.

The full article is available here and is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal.

Chapter 11’s Descent into Lawlessness
by | posted in: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Jurisprudence, Workouts and Pre-Packs | 0

By Lynn M. LoPucki (Security Pacific Bank Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law)

Lynn M. LoPucki

The bankruptcy courts that compete for big cases frequently ignore the Bankruptcy Code and Rules. This Article documents that lawlessness through a detailed examination of the court file in Belk, Inc.—a one-day Chapter 11—and a series of empirical studies.

Chapter 11’s lawlessness reached a new extreme in Belk. Belk filed in Houston on the evening of February 23, 2021. The court confirmed the plan at ten o’clock the next morning, and the parties consummated the plan that same afternoon. Almost none of Chapter 11’s procedural requirements were met. The court did not give creditors notice of the disclosure statement or plan confirmation hearings until after those hearings were held. Belk filed no list of creditors’ names and addresses, no schedules, no statement of financial affairs, and no monthly operating reports.  No creditors’ committee was appointed, no meeting of creditors was held, and none of the professionals filed fee applications. The ad hoc groups that negotiated the plan failed to file Rule 2019 disclosures. Because no schedules were filed, no proofs of claim were deemed filed. Only eighteen of Belk’s ninety-thousand creditors filed proofs of claim, and Belk apparently just made distributions to whomever Belk considered worthy. 

The procedural failures in Belk are just the tip of the iceberg.  The competing courts are ignoring impermissible retention bonuses, refusing to appoint mandatory examiners, failing to monitor venue or transfer cases, granting every request to reject collective bargaining agreements, and providing debtors with critical-vendor slush funds. The article is available here. 

What’s Done is Done: Third Circuit Upholds Equitable Mootness and Rules Out Possibility of Individualized Relief for Timely Objecting Party
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Chapter 11, Jurisprudence | 0

By Robert Lemons (Weil) and Patrick Feeney (Weil)

Robert Lemons
Patrick Feeney

Over the past several years, certain circuits criticized the Equitable Mootness doctrine for its lack of statutory basis and effect of avoiding review of chapter 11 plans on the merits.  However, the Third Circuit recently held in In re Nuverra Environmental Solutions, Inc. v. Hargreaves, Case No. 18-3084, 834 Fed. Appx. 729 (3d Cir. Jan. 6, 2021), that the Equitable Mootness doctrine is still alive and well.

 The Third Circuit rejected the appeal of Hargreaves, a creditor who timely objected to the chapter 11 plan and timely appealed the bankruptcy court’s entry of the plan’s confirmation order, because the plan was already substantially consummated and could not be unwound.  Further, the Third Circuit held that it could not grant Hargreaves “individualized relief” because such relief would violate Bankruptcy Code § 1123(a)(4)’s restriction on preferential treatment of class members and § 1129(b)(1)’s prohibition on unfair discrimination between classes. 

 In a concurring opinion, Judge Krause rejected the application of Equitable Mootness, finding the majority did not sufficiently analyze whether disparate treatment of creditors within a class is permissible on appeal when parties choose not to object to, or appeal confirmation of, the plan.  Judge Krause also noted that denial of the appeal on Equitable Mootness grounds precluded consideration of substantive arguments and development of the Third Circuit’s bankruptcy jurisprudence.  

While Judge Krause’s concurring opinion highlights difficulties plan objectors face when appealing plan confirmation, the majority opinion signals that Equitable Mootness is still a healthy doctrine in the Third Circuit.

The full article is available here.

The Municipal Bond Cases Revisited
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Corporate Governance, Jurisprudence | 0

By Allison Buccola (Independent) and Vince Buccola (Assistant Professor, The Wharton School)

Allison Buccola
Vince Buccola

Puerto Rico’s Title III proceedings under PROMESA mark the return of debt repudiation as a feature of the government debt restructuring landscape. Backed by an official committee, the Federal Oversight and Management Board has argued that some $6 billion of bonds the Commonwealth issued are void and worthless. According to the Board, the bonds were sold illegally, in contravention of a constitutional debt limit, so that (also according to the Board) they cannot bind the Commonwealth. A similar argument was lodged in Detroit’s bankruptcy. For the better part of a century before that, however, repudiation was mostly unheard of in the United States. 

The invocation of ultra vires to escape bond obligations is nothing new, though. In the second half of the nineteenth century, municipal debtors frequently welched on their debts. In the 1850s and 1860s, cities, towns, and counties across the Midwest and West issued bonds to finance the construction of railroads and other infrastructure. Many ultimately defaulted. Rather than simply announce that they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, however, they often contended that they needn’t pay: for one or another reason, the relevant bonds had been issued ultra vires and so were no obligation of the municipality at all. Litigation in the federal courts was common. Several hundred repudiation disputes made their way to the Supreme Court in the forty years starting 1859.

With an eye to the modern cases, we set out to understand how the Court reckoned with repudiation. We read every one of the 196 cases in which the Justices opined on bond validity (i.e. the enforceability of a bond in the hands of innocent purchasers). In a recently published article, we correct received wisdom about the cases and remark on the logical structure of the Court’s reasoning.

To the extent the municipal bond cases are remembered, modern scholars usually think of them as exemplary instances of a political model of judging. The caricature has the Court siding with bondholders even when the law called on them to rule for the repudiating municipalities. The Justices—or a majority of them—are imagined as staunch political allies of the capitalist class, set against the institutions of state government and their regard for agricultural interests. We find that this picture is inconsistent with reality. In fact, the Court ruled for the repudiating municipality in a third of all the validity cases. As importantly, the Court’s decisions reflected a readily articulable formal logic, a logic the Justices seem, to our eyes, to have applied soundly.

The Court’s analytical approach traded on a distinction between legal and factual bases for repudiation. A municipality might repudiate either on a theory that no legal authority permitted the contested bond to be issued under the circumstances the bondholder alleged or, alternatively, on a theory that the circumstances alleged did not in fact pertain. Where the theory of repudiation turned on a legal predicate, the Court simply proceeded to the merits, comparing the bond to the powers granted to the issuer by state law at the time of issuance. Repudiating municipalities often prevailed.

Where the theory of repudiation turned on a factual predicate, by contrast, bondholders fared much better. The defining theme in such cases was a procedural mechanism that precluded assessment of the merits, namely the adaptation of estoppel doctrine to the municipal context. It was, and still is, customary for bonds to recite circumstances relevant to issuance. Estoppel allowed buyers in the secondary market to credit whatever facts—but only facts—the issuer declared true at the time of issuance. In a number of debt-limit cases reminiscent of Puerto Rico, this logic propelled bondholders to a judgment. Estoppel did not resolve all fact-based repudiation arguments. It did not foreclose a trial if, for example, the contested bond failed to recite a predicate fact. Nevertheless estoppel was an important feature of the bond cases, one which, given the profound asymmetry of information that prevailed with respect to matters of fact, probably helped to sustain the bond market as a source of capital for municipal development.

The article can be found here.

Delaware Corporate Law and the “End of History” in Creditor Protection
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Corporate Governance, Jurisprudence | 0

By Jared A. Ellias (University of California Hastings Law) and Robert J. Stark (Brown Rudnick LLP)

Jared A. Ellias
Robert J. Stark

We briefly survey the common law’s adventures with creditor protection over the course of American history with a special focus on Delaware, the most important jurisdiction for corporate law. We examine the evolution of the equitable doctrines that judges have used to answer a question that arises time and again: What help, if any, should the common law be to creditors that suffer losses due to the purported carelessness or disloyalty of corporate directors and officers? Judges have struggled to answer that question, first deploying Judge Story’s “trust fund doctrine” and then molding fiduciary duty law to fashion a remedy for creditors. In Delaware, the appetite of corporate law judges to protect creditors reached a high point in the early 2000s as judges flirted with recognizing a “deepening insolvency” tort cause of action. Suddenly, though, a new course was set, and Delaware’s judges effectively abandoned this project in a series of important decisions around the time of the financial crisis. In this “third generation” of jurisprudence, Delaware’s corporate law judges told creditors to look to other areas of law to protect themselves from opportunistic misconduct, such as bankruptcy law, fraudulent transfer law, and their loan contracts. However, the same question of whether the common law ought to protect creditors has arisen time and again and today’s “settled” law is unlikely to represent the end of history in creditor protection.

The full chapter is available here.

For related Roundtable posts, see Jared Ellias and Robert Stark, Bankruptcy Hardball.

Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing Examined: La Paloma
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Jurisprudence | 0

By Ronit J. Berkovich and Fraser Andrews (Weil)

Ronit J. Berkovich
Fraser Andrews

On January 13, 2020, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware issued an opinion in In re La Paloma Generating Company, LLC., Case No. 16-12700 [Adv. Pro. No.19-50110], which examined the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing in the context of an intercreditor agreement (ICA) governing the relationship between the First Lien Lender (First Lien Lender) and the Second Lien Lenders (Second Lien Lenders) to the Debtors.  The bankruptcy court held a party cannot be in breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing under New York law when merely enforcing a contractual right, in this case the First Lien Lender enforcing the ICA.

The full article is available here.

Inequitable Subordination: Distressing Distressed Claims Purchasers by Propagating Subordination Benefit Elimination Theory
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Claims Trading, Jurisprudence | 0

By Jay Rao (University of California, Berkeley, School of Law)

Jay Rao

This Article examines the application of equitable subordination under Title 11 of the United States Code to bankruptcy claims purchasing transactions that transpire after the occurrence of inequitable conduct by a third party. Although a significant issue with practical consequences, it has drawn relatively scant commentary. To the author’s knowledge, no scholarship to date has attempted to comprehensively discuss the issue or describe the indirect cleansing and washing of tainted claims resulting therefrom. While analyzing and criticizing the current state of the law, this Article introduces the concepts of the “subordination benefit,” “subordination benefit elimination theory,” and “limited subordination benefit theory” to facilitate and further conversations related to the intersection of equitable subordination and bankruptcy claims trading.

This Article primarily aims to promote an active, fluid bankruptcy claims trading market to, on an ex post basis, benefit creditors and, on an ex ante basis, reduce the cost, and induce the extension, of credit in the primary capital markets, thereby supporting the broader economy. Additionally, this Article seeks to reduce indirect cleansing of tainted claims and indirect claims washing through the bankruptcy claims market.

The subject matter is particularly timely and relevant, given the recent publication of the Final Report and Recommendations of the American Bankruptcy Institute Commission to Study the Reform of Chapter 11, the significant growth of the claims trading market and increasing activity and sophistication of distressed investors, and the recent formation of the American Bankruptcy Institute’s Claims Trading Committee.

This Article argues that subordination benefit elimination theory, which represents the dominant theory propagated by courts and commentators, finds support in a misguided reading of caselaw and conflicts with sound economic policy and logic. Further, while acknowledging limited subordination benefit theory is a superior approach to subordination benefit elimination theory, this Article argues that limited subordination benefit theory also runs contrary to sound economic policy and logic. This Article requests commentators and courts halt and reverse the propagation of subordination benefit elimination theory and avoid disseminating limited subordination benefit theory. Instead, this Article proposes post-misconduct discounted claims purchasers be entitled to participate in the subordination benefit to the same extent as pre-misconduct claimholders.

If commentators and courts are unready to abandon both theories and if required to make a suboptimal binary choice, this Article suggests limited subordination benefit theory be propagated and utilized in lieu of subordination benefit elimination theory.

The full article is available here.

Do the Right Firms Survive Bankruptcy?
by | posted in: 363 Sale, Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Jurisprudence | 0
Samuel Antill
Samuel Antill

By Samuel Antill (Stanford Graduate School of Business)

In Chapter 11 bankruptcies, a court-supervised negotiation among creditors leads to one of two possible forms of exit, liquidation or emergence. In a liquidation, the bankrupt firm’s assets are sold (piecemeal or in a going-concern sale). Alternatively, if creditors agree to restructure the firm’s liabilities, the firm emerges and continues operating. I estimate a structural model of the choice between emergence and liquidation. In my sample of large-firm bankruptcies, I estimate that creditor recovery was substantially reduced by inefficient decisions to liquidate.

According to the “creditor’s bargain” theory of bankruptcy, the efficient form of exit (liquidation or emergence) from Chapter 11 is that which optimizes total expected creditor recovery. Beyond the importance to creditor recovery, an efficient approach to choosing between liquidation and emergence benefits pre-bankruptcy equity holders through lower costs of credit. The efficient form of exit from bankruptcy should be achieved, under the conditions of the Coase Theorem, by the bargaining among creditors that Chapter 11 is supposed to promote. Without this bargaining, potential coordination failures arise when each creditor pursues the form of exit that maximizes its own payoff.

In contrast to the view that Coasian bargaining in Chapter 11 successfully preserves viable firms, I estimate that inefficient decisions to liquidate are frequent. However, very few of the firms in my sample were inefficiently selected to emerge. I provide an explanation for this asymmetry. Exiting Chapter 11 through a confirmed plan of reorganization requires creditor consent under established voting rules. In contrast, Section 363(b) of the bankruptcy code allows managers to sell assets, or entire firms, without creditor approval. This procedure circumvents the bargaining among creditors that Chapter 11 supposedly promotes. I show that inefficient liquidations are concentrated in cases involving “363 sales.” This statistical association suggests that Section 363(b) enables the sort of coordination failure that Chapter 11 was designed to prevent. For example, these results are consistent with a view that managers may be inefficiently liquidating firms in order to benefit senior lenders or to obtain a job for themselves at a purchasing company.

Finally, I find that inefficient liquidations are largely avoidable. Using my estimated model, I consider the following counterfactual: how would expected creditor recovery change if form-of-exit decisions had been made by a statistical model? In this counterfactual scenario, the courts would hire a statistician to compare the expected potential recovery rates implied by my fitted model and recommend either liquidation or emergence. Each recommendation depends only on data available at the start of a given bankruptcy. I find that such a court statistician could dramatically improve average recovery.

The full article is available here.

Teams and Bankruptcy
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Corporate Governance, Jurisprudence, Valuation | 0

Ramin Baghai (Stockholm School of Economics), Rui Silva (London Business School), Luofu Ye (London Business School)

Corporate bankruptcies constitute an important mechanism through which the economy rids itself of obsolete firms and allocates their constituent parts to alternative and potentially more productive uses. This process of reallocation of human and physical capital is an “essential fact about capitalism” (Schumpeter 1942).

While resources may on average be used more productively following a bankruptcy, this process is not deterministic and likely involves various imperfections. In addition to the potential loss in value to the firm’s redeployable physical capital stock (e.g., due to asset fire sales), bankruptcy may involve some deterioration of organizational and human capital. Moreover, frictions in the post-bankruptcy re-allocation of resources across firms may lead capital and labor to be idle for some time or even result in protracted sub-optimal uses. In the case of workers, unemployment spells could also accelerate the depreciation of skills. While prior studies have focused primarily on the reallocation of physical capital and individual workers, we are the first to systematically study how the human capital embedded in teams is affected by corporate bankruptcies.

Teamwork has become a prevalent way of organizing production in science, in patenting, and, more broadly, in the corporate sector. It has been documented, in a variety of settings, that teamwork has substantial benefits compared to work in hierarchical environments, in particular when complex tasks are involved. Despite the importance of teamwork, there is little systematic evidence on the economic drivers affecting the creation, stability, and dissolution of productive team configurations. Understanding these forces is crucial for the design of corporate and public policies that maximize productivity.

In our working paper, we use employer-employee matched data on U.S. inventors to study how the human capital embedded in teams is reallocated in corporate bankruptcies; our data span the period 1980 to 2010. Our results paint a nuanced picture of the reallocation of human capital through bankruptcy. Team dissolution increases around bankruptcy and team inventors subsequently become less productive than their less team-dependent colleagues. However, the labor market and the market for corporate control promote the preservation of team-specific human capital. Therefore, on balance, the productivity losses associated with bankruptcy are modest for team-dependent inventors. In addition, inventors who do not work in teams may even experience an increase in their post-bankruptcy productivity (although these effects have limited statistical significance). This suggests that bankruptcies have the capacity to release resources to more productive uses. Overall, we conclude that frictions that limit the efficiency of asset reallocation through bankruptcy may be limited in the case of highly skilled labor.

The full article is available here.

Bankruptcy’s Cathedral: Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Distress
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Reform, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Jurisprudence, Legislation | 0

By Vincent S.J. Buccola (University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School)

What good can a corporate bankruptcy regime do in the modern economy? The question bears asking because the environment in which distressed companies find themselves is so markedly different from the environment of just twenty years ago—to say nothing of the days of the equity receiverships, of sections 77 and 77B, of Chapters X and XI. The most important changes are well known: increased depth and liquidity of financial markets and, especially, increased capacity of financial contracting to say ex ante how distress will be resolved ex post. Recent efforts to take stock of contemporary bankruptcy practice, most notably the ABI’s Chapter 11 reform project, grapple implicitly with the significance of a changing environment. But by leaving the matter implicit, they underscore a lacuna about what the law’s marginal contribution to the economic order might be.

In a forthcoming article, Bankruptcy’s Cathedral, I hazard a general answer and elaborate its implications for a few prominent uses of bankruptcy in today’s practice.

The characteristic function of bankruptcy law, I say, is to recharacterize the mode in which an investor’s relationship to a distressed firm is governed. In particular, bankruptcy frequently toggles the protection of an investor’s economic interests from a property rule, in the Calabresi and Melamed sense, to a liability rule. It swaps out the investor’s unilateral right upon default to withdraw her investment, when such a right would ordinarily prevail, in favor of a judicially mediated procedure designed to give her the official value of her right. The automatic stay furnishes an example. It extinguishes a secured creditor’s power to repossess and sell collateral, and supplies instead a right only to what the bankruptcy judge determines to be “adequate protection” of its interest in the collateral.

This toggling function can be useful, Property rules are often more efficient during a company’s financial health than during distress. A state-contingent meta rule that switches between the two thus might be optimal. But what about financial contracting? Why can’t investors stipulate state-contingent meta rules if indeed they can maximize surplus by doing so? The short answer is that in some cases contract is sufficient, but in other cases legal or practical impediments are insuperable. The marginal contribution of bankruptcy law, then, is to supply toggling rules where investors cannot practically do so on their own.

One implication of my approach is to index the justifiable scope of bankruptcy to contingent facts about the efficacy of financial contracting. In environments where it is difficult for investors to specify state-contingent toggling rules, whether because of legal prohibition or practical impossibility, the compass for bankruptcy law is wider. As contract becomes more efficacious, bankruptcy’s brief grows correspondingly shorter.

This normative schema can be used to assess one-by-one the many actual interventions of bankruptcy laws. I scrutinize three uses of bankruptcy that are important in today’s practice: to confirm prepackaged plans, to effect going-concern sales, and to take advantage of the automatic stay. I find plausible justifications for a legal institution to bind holdout creditors and to extinguish in rem claims against a debtor’s assets. The automatic stay, on the other hand, is harder to justify. (The curious must read within to find out why.) More generally, though, my approach shows how one can weigh the contributions of a bankruptcy regime against its redundant or even counterproductive in light of contracting innovations.

The complete article is available for download here.

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