In a decision of first impression, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois imposed sanctions on a debtor’s counsel and his law firm for filing a brief that included fabricated citations to case law and nonexistent quotations that were generated by AI.
A recent Third Circuit decision supports the general proposition that a bankruptcy proceeding cannot be used to revive foreclosure-related disputes that have been previously and conclusively resolved by a state court.
The “risk management” aspect of LME focuses on the compensation to be paid to the participating lenders to provide new investment and the additional time or optionality gained for the equity sponsor. Frequently the LME is followed by a bankruptcy case in which the participating lenders again attempt to exercise control over the process and their compensation through a restructuring support agreement and a prepackaged Chapter 11 plan. At least one district court has concluded that compensation payable to a subset of lender/investors in a creditor class violates this requirement, derailing a confirmed prepackaged Chapter 11 plan and remanding to the bankruptcy court to remedy.
Although alleged oversight claims are not uncommon, this case was unusual because the claims were not asserted derivatively by shareholders. Given the informational advantage enjoyed by the plan administrator, it was not surprising that the court found the complaint adequately pleaded Caremark claims against the named director defendants and two of the company’s officers.
Representing a lender during the workout of a troubled commercial real estate loan requires an attorney to protect the client from unanticipated consequences and material miscalculations. In addition to negotiating and documenting the prospective workout agreement, an attorney must preserve the client’s rights and remedies during business-level negotiations to protect against prejudice in the event a final agreement cannot be reached and remedies must be pursued.
In this article, we report on two recent decisions. One involves the calculation of landlord damage claims under Section 502 of the Bankruptcy Code, and the other involves whether environmental clean-up claims under federal and state law for commercial real estate were discharged under a confirmed Chapter 11 plan.
In a matter of first impression, the U.S. Bankruptcy Appellate Panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit determined that allegations of abuse constituted a personal injury tort claim, reversing a lower court’s conclusion that the allegations constituted a mental health condition.
Many single asset real estate (SARE) bankruptcies will check some or all of the boxes for a bad faith filing. The timing of a SARE filing commonly suggests an intent to delay, as SARE filings are generally a last resort to stay foreclosure. Nevertheless, courts may be reluctant to dispose of these cases as bad faith filings, absent particularly egregious circumstances evidencing patent abuse of the bankruptcy process.
So-called “creditor on creditor violence” resulting from liability management exercises (LME) can take different forms. In some aggressive cases, certain lenders are given the opportunity to finance the borrower and gain extra value or better their positions in a restructuring, while other similar lenders are left out.
In the recent case of In re ONH AFC CS Investors, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware examined the issue of standing in the context of a fraudulent conveyance action and whether a liquidating trustee had standing to pursue fraudulent conveyance claims when the beneficiaries of those claims were the debtors’ equity holders. Under limited circumstances, which were present in this case, the court found that the trustee could pursue such claims.
