[Texas Two-Step and the Future of Mass Tort Bankruptcy Series] Is the Texas Two-Step a Proper Chapter 11 Dance?
by | posted in: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Reform, Chapter 11, Corporate Governance, fraudulent transfer, Mass Torts, Texas Two-Step and the Future of Mass Tort Bankruptcy Series, Third-Party Releases | 0

By David Skeel (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School)

Note: This is the fifth in a series of posts on the Texas Two-Step, the bankruptcy of LTL Management, and the future of mass tort bankruptcies.  Check the HLS Bankruptcy Roundtable throughout the summer for additional contributing posts by academics from institutions across the country.

Earlier posts in this series can be found here (by Jin Lee and Amelia Ricketts), here (by Jonathan C. Lipson), here (by Jared A. Ellias), and here (by Anthony Casey and Joshua Macey).

***

David Skeel

Are Texas Two-Steps ever a proper use of Chapter 11?  The argument that they aren’t—a view held by some scholars and reflected in proposed legislation in Washington—isn’t silly. Most current bankruptcy scholars grew up with Thomas Jackson’s creditors’ bargain theory of bankruptcy, which explains bankruptcy as a solution to creditor coordination problems that threaten to jeopardize the going concern value of an otherwise viable firm. The BadCo that files for bankruptcy in a Texas two-step does not have any going concern value. It’s just trying to manage massive liabilities. Why should this be allowed?

In rejecting a challenge to Johnson & Johnson’s recent two-step, the bankruptcy court supplied a forceful rejoinder to the view that preserving going concern value (or otherwise efficiently deploying a distressed company’s assets) is the only proper purpose for Chapter 11. Judge Kaplan points out that bankruptcy is often a superior mechanism for resolving tort liability as compared to the Multidistrict Litigation process or piecemeal litigation outside of bankruptcy. It is more orderly and can give more equitable and consistent treatment to victims. Judge Kaplan’s conclusion that LTL (the BadCo created by the J&J two-step) belongs in bankruptcy, and that a bankruptcy that involves mass tort liabilities but not the ongoing business that caused them is proper, is fully defensible in my view.

Where Judge Kaplan’s opinion goes off the rails is in too cavalierly dismissing the possibility that two-steps will be abused, as when he muses that “open[ing] the floodgates” to two-steps might not be such a bad thing. Those crafting future two-steps will be tempted to leave BadCo with inadequate ability to pay its victims, since nothing in the Texas divisional merger statute prevents this. Bankruptcy supplies two tools for policing these abuses, the good faith requirement [BRT: see this earlier Roundtable post on good faith and Texas Two-Steps] and fraudulent conveyance law. If courts are vigilant, these tools should be sufficient to discourage abusive two-steps. But if courts are cavalier about the potential abuses, the legislation pending in Washington will begin to seem a lot less ill-advised.

Perhaps the best thing that could happen for Texas two-steps would be for courts to bar the use of non-debtor releases outside of the asbestos context, where they are explicitly authorized by section 524(g) of the Bankruptcy Code. The Second Circuit may be poised to take this step in the Purdue Pharma opioid case, if it upholds the District Court’s conclusion that the releases of nondebtors in that case—most notably, the Sackler family—are not authorized by the Bankruptcy Code. If non-debtor releases were disallowed except where explicitly authorized, Texas two-steps would remain viable in asbestos cases such as J&J, but the floodgates would not open in other contexts, since the maneuver only works if the eventual reorganization includes a non-debtor release for GoodCo.

Notes from the Puerto Rico Oversight (Not Control) Board
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Municipal Bankruptcy | 0

By David Skeel (University of Pennsylvania Law School)

David Skeel
David Skeel

On June 30, 2016, Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (“PROMESA”) in response to the economic crisis in Puerto Rico, which was already a decade old at that point and had left Puerto Rico with roughly $70 billion in overall debt and $50 billion of unfunded pension liabilities. PROMESA created a seven-member oversight board (the “Oversight Board”), and authorized the Oversight Board both to certify five (or more) year fiscal plans for Puerto Rico and its public corporations, and to initiate bankruptcy-like proceedings if necessary.

For over three years now, I’ve had the privilege of serving as one of the seven initial members of the Oversight Board.  It has been a rocky ride at times, and we have been criticized both from the right (by creditors unhappy with our conclusion the debt needs to be significantly restructured) and from the left (for our conclusion that government reform and right-sizing are needed).  The past year has finally brought at least some evidence of progress, although significant obstacles remain before anyone will be able to declare victory.

In this essay, I chronicle the Board’s efforts up to the beginning of last summer, shortly before widespread protests of the former governor led to his resignation. I begin with a brief sketch of the depth of Puerto Rico’s economic distress, which was made far worse by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, and of the principal responsibilities vested in the Oversight Board by PROMESA. I then survey the major decisions the Oversight Board has made—or in some cases, unsuccessfully tried to make—and the challenges that remain as the current Board members come to the end of our terms (which theoretically ended on August 31, three years after we were appointed, but continue until we are replaced with new members by the President and Congress).

The full article is available here.

Bankruptcy for Banks: A Tribute (and Little Plea) to Jay Westbrook
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Bankruptcy Reform, Financial Firms and Safe Harbors, Legislation | 0

By David A. Skeel, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania Law School)

Over the past several years, Congress has considered various versions of a legislative reform that would amend the Bankruptcy Code to facilitate the prompt reorganization of systemically important financial institutions (“SIFIs”). The reform would adapt the “Single Point of Entry” strategy devised for use under Title II of the Dodd Frank Act to bankruptcy. In each context, the assets, short term liabilities, and secured debt of the troubled SIFI would be transferred to a newly created bridge institution, leaving behind its stock and long-term debt. The newly recapitalized bridge institution would be fully solvent, and could contribute liquidity to the troubled subsidiaries as necessary. Although the bankruptcy for banks legislation appears to have strong support in Congress, its reception among bankruptcy scholars has been mixed.

In this short essay, I take the opportunity of a celebration of the work and influence of Jay Westbrook to explore his and his fellow critics’ opposition to bankruptcy for banks. I begin the essay by surveying Jay’s wide-ranging contributions to bankruptcy scholarship. Jay’s functional analysis has had a profound effect on scholars’ understanding of key issues in domestic bankruptcy law, and Jay has been the leading scholarly figure on cross-border insolvency. After surveying Jay’s influence, I turn to the topic at hand: bankruptcy for banks. Jay has been a strong critic of the proposed reforms, arguing among other things that financial institutions need to be resolved by regulators and an administrative process, not bankruptcy. After addressing these and other objections, I ask Jay if he might reconsider his opposition if the legislation were amended to respond to several of his primary concerns.

The essay is available here.

Roundup: Recent Op-Eds on Bankruptcy for Banks
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Roundtable Updates, Financial Firms and Safe Harbors | 0

The House of Representatives’ passage first of the Financial Institution Bankruptcy Act (FIBA) and then of the Financial CHOICE Act last Thursday has made bankruptcy for banks and the fate of Dodd-Frank’s Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA) a live issue again. Both FIBA and the CHOICE Act would add a “subchapter V” to chapter 11 to resolve financial conglomerates in bankruptcy. Unlike FIBA, however, the CHOICE Act would also repeal the OLA, leaving bankruptcy as the only option for handling the failure of a financial conglomerate.

Several academics, former regulators, and practitioners, including several contributors to the Bankruptcy Roundtable, have recently published op-eds weighing arguments for and against replacing the OLA with bankruptcy. Support for adding tools to the Bankruptcy Code is widespread. Commentators differ, however, on whether bankruptcy, by itself, can address the systemic risk concerns that prompted the creation of the OLA and on whether it would be useful to have a bankruptcy procedure more robust than subchapter V.

Stephen Lubben contends that without a mechanism for providing liquidity to financial institutions—the usual providers of funding for companies in chapter 11—the Bankruptcy Code cannot effectively handle a widespread financial crisis. Mark Roe emphasizes that economic stability requires having the OLA and related structures to allow subchapter V to succeed (through regulatory coordination with international authorities and supervision over financial institutions to ensure that they have the capital structures to facilitate a subchapter V resolution). The OLA is also needed in case a subchapter V reorganization fails, as subchapter V is not a general bankruptcy authorization but, instead, a mechanism to use the 48-hour “single-point-of-entry” restructuring strategy in bankruptcy. This point renews some of the arguments Roe and David Skeel expressed earlier on ways subchapter V should be strengthened, such as by the addition of a regulatory trigger and a means to deal with an inability to complete the resolution within 48 hours.

Finally, Sheila Bair and Paul Volcker argue that having the OLA as a backstop for a failed bankruptcy makes government bailouts less likely, as the OLA provides regulators with the tools to wind down a failed financial institution in an orderly fashion. In contrast, Stephen Hessler argues that the Bankruptcy Code, amended along the lines of subchapter V, would promote both market discipline and financial stability. A bankruptcy judge applying well established precedents and rules in a subchapter V case would combat moral hazard more effectively than the OLA, which grants regulators significant discretion to treat similarly situated creditors differently.

(By Rebecca Green, Harvard Law School, J.D. 2017.)

Recent Roundtable coverage of this subject includes posts on a letter submitted to Congress by academics and the Trump administration’s direction to the Treasury to issue a report on the OLA.

Bankruptcy on the Side
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction | 0

By Kenneth Ayotte (University of California – Berkeley School of Law), Anthony J. Casey (University of Chicago Law School), David A. Skeel, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania Law School)

 

Side agreements—such as intercreditor and “bad boy” agreements—are increasingly at the center of major bankruptcy disputes. Litigation around these disputes can be costly and the results of that litigation can dramatically alter the landscape within which the stakeholders bargain over reorganization.

These agreements commonly include a promise by one party to remain silent by waiving some procedural right they would otherwise have under the Bankruptcy Code. Those waivers are invoked at crucial points in the reorganization process, including the approval of debtor-in-possession financing and plan confirmation.

In our new paper, Bankruptcy on the Side, we show that while side agreements have beneficial potential, the parties entering them often impose negative externalities on outsiders. A promise not to extend new financing, for example, can affect the debtor’s reorganization prospects. Similarly, a promise not to object to a reorganization plan can rob the court of information that might benefit the other classes of creditors.

The paper presents a simple model to derive a proposal that is consistent with the intent of the parties to the side agreement but also limits negative externalities. The core of the proposal is that where there is a nontrivial potential for value-destroying externalities, the court should limit a nonbreaching party’s remedy to its expectation damages. On the other hand, if the agreement is unlikely to cause externalities, a court should enforce the agreement according to its terms. Our proposal is different and superior to the approach taken by most courts, which invokes a narrow interpretative standard to invalidate side agreements. We focus instead on enforcing the provisions under normal interpretative doctrines while limiting the use of special remedies like specific performance and stipulated damages.

The insights of our paper also provide a new answer to thorny questions involved in choosing which courts should resolve disputes over intercreditor agreements, and in deciding whether forum selection clauses should be enforced. Specifically, the bankruptcy courts have no specialized expertise for cases where the plaintiff seeks expectation damages. In those cases, the court should defer to default venue rules and forum selection clauses. Where specific performance or stipulated damages are at issue, by contrast, our model suggests that the dispute should be resolved exclusively in bankruptcy proceedings.

 

From Chrysler and General Motors to Detroit
by | posted in: Cramdown and Priority, Municipal Bankruptcy | 0

By David A. Skeel, Jr., University of Pennsylvania Law School

dskeel

In the past five years, three of the most remarkable bankruptcy cases in American history have come out of Detroit: the bankruptcies of Chrysler and General Motors in 2009, and of Detroit itself in 2013. The principal objective of this Article is simply to show that the Grand Bargain at the heart of the Detroit bankruptcy is the direct offspring of the bankruptcy sale transactions that were used to restructure Chrysler and GM. The proponents of Detroit’s “Grand Bargain” never would have dreamed up the transaction were it not for the federal government-engineered carmaker bankruptcies. The Article’s second objective, based the comparison of the Detroit cases, is to make a very brief case for reform of bankruptcy sales.

Part I of the Article briefly surveys the increased use of bankruptcy sales and related shifts in Chapter 11 practice over the past several decades. Part II describes the Chrysler and General Motors bankruptcies, which built on but radically expanded the scope of a bankruptcy sale. Part III turns to the Detroit bankruptcy, focusing primarily on the “Grand Bargain,” while also exploring the city’s use of another recent bankruptcy strategy, known as “gifting.” The Article concludes, in a brief final part, that the Detroit cases have pushed recent bankruptcy innovations to their logical extremes — and beyond — exposing the need to update the oversight of bankruptcy sales.

The full version of this article is available here.

 

Single Point of Entry and the Bankruptcy Alternative
by | posted in: Financial Firms and Safe Harbors | 0

Author: David A. Skeel, Jr., University of Pennsylvania Law School

dskeel

The Dodd-Frank Act requires systemically important financial institutions to prepare living wills explaining how they could be smoothly resolved in bankruptcy.  Yet Dodd-Frank itself did not do anything to ensure that the bankruptcy laws actually are adequate to the task of handling a major financial institution.  Earlier this month, the House Judiciary committee unanimously approved proposed legislation (known colloquially as “Subchapter V”) that is designed to finish the job.  Subchapter V would mimic the single point of entry strategy that the FDIC has devised for resolution under the Dodd-Frank Act by facilitating a quick sale of the assets and some of the liabilities of the financial institution’s holding company in bankruptcy.

In this Essay (which pre-dates Subchapter V), I consider the risks and benefits of single of entry and the bankruptcy alternative.  The Essay begins with a brief overview of concerns raised by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, and points out that the Dodd-Frank Act as enacted left nearly all of them unaddressed.   By contrast, the FDIC’s new single point of entry strategy, which is introduced in the second section, can be seen as addressing nearly all of them.  The third and fourth sections point out some of the limitations of single point of entry, first by highlighting potential pitfalls and distortions and then by explaining that single point of entry does not end the too-big-to-fail problem and would not reduce worrisome concentration in the financial services industry.  The final section turns to bankruptcy, and shows that the single-entry-style strategy can easily be replicated in bankruptcy.  Indeed, the strategy harkens back to the original procedure used to reorganize American railroads well over a century ago.

The full version of the article can be found here.

Bankruptcy Law as a Liquidity Provider
by | posted in: Claims Trading | 0

Authors: Kenneth Ayotte & David Skeel

Since the outset of the recent financial crisis, liquidity problems have been cited as the cause behind the bankruptcies and near bankruptcies of numerous firms, ranging from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in 2008 to Kodak more recently.  As Kodak’s lead bankruptcy lawyer explained to the court on the first day of the case: “We’re here for liquidity.” In this Article, we offer the first theoretical analysis of bankruptcy’s crucial role in creating liquidity for firms in financial distress.

The dominant normative theory of bankruptcy (the “Creditors Bargain theory”) argues that bankruptcy should be limited to solving coordination problems caused by multiple creditors. Using simple numerical illustrations, we show that two well-known problems that cause illiquidity–debt overhang and adverse selection– are more severe in the presence of multiple, uncoordinated creditors.  Hence, bankruptcy is justified in addressing them.

We discuss the Bankruptcy Code’s existing liquidity-providing rules, such as the ability to issue new senior claims, and the ability to sell assets free and clear of liens and other claims.  In addition to identifying this function in a variety of provisions that have not previously been recognized as related, our theory also explains how the recent trend toward creditor control in Chapter 11 cases can be explained as an attempt to create illiquidity for strategic advantage.  Although bankruptcy’s liquidity providing rules are essential, especially in the current environment, they also carry costs, such as the risk of “continuation bias.”  To address these costs, we propose qualitative principles for striking the balance between debtor liquidity and respect for nonbankruptcy rights.

University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 80, Fall 2013.  A draft is available on SSRN.

Bankruptcy and Economic Recovery
by | posted in: Bankruptcy Administration and Jurisdiction, Workouts and Pre-Packs | 0

Authors: Thomas Jackson & David Skeel

A striking feature of the recent economic crisis was the long period of subpar economic growth that continued even after the crisis had officially ended.  Although discussion about how to spur economic recovery has focused on the efficacy of Keynesian stimulus spending, this is only one of many factors that might plausibly encourage growth.  For a book entitled “Financial Restructuring to Sustain Recovery,” published by the Brookings Institution, we were asked to discuss the role that bankruptcy policy plays, or might play, in economic recovery.

After summarizing how bankruptcy posits a collective solution to a common pool problem of individual creditors and thereby improves the efficient use of assets, we consider two obstacles to its effectiveness.  The first is that bankruptcy proceedings often seem to begin too late.  The increased influence of debtors’ principal lenders probably counteracts this problem in part, but we suspect not fully.  We consider a wide range of strategies that lawmakers might use to encourage timely filing, some of which are fairly simple, while others are more speculative.

The second major issue is the relationship between bankruptcy and jobs.  The question whether bankruptcy should be used to protect jobs is a recurring theme that came to the fore most recently when the government used bankruptcy to bail out Chrysler, justifying its intervention as preserving jobs.  We caution that distorting the standard bankruptcy rules—focused on efficient use of assets—to save jobs in the short run may have more problematic effects overall.

The full-length article can be found here.