A Chapter 7 trustee may pursue any claims or causes of action, including avoidance actions to challenge post-petition transfers of property of the estate, that are property of a debtor’s estate. In a recent decision in the case of In re Genger, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York addressed the distinction between direct claims versus derivative claims in the context of a post-petition release.
In a post-Purdue world — where non-consensual third-party releases are prohibited — bankruptcy practitioners and courts alike have been required to consider and determine what exactly “consent” means for purposes of soliciting such releases.
Sanchez shows the limits of bankruptcy jurisdiction in concrete terms. In the court’s hard-hitting analysis, the decision should at least convince bankruptcy courts to avoid hearing most post-confirmation and unrelated third-party disputes.
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.
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.
A person who was not a creditor of a bankruptcy estate was entitled to actual notice of an injunction that would bar the non-creditor from suing the debtors’ insurance carriers, a federal court has ruled.
The Fifth Circuit recently addressed a new fact pattern and issue concerning the Barton doctrine: whether a receiver appointed in a state court action could be sued in a subsequent bankruptcy case of the debtor absent court permission.
How to harmonize a debtor’s right to file against a creditor’s desire to protect its financial interests in that debtor has sparked a number of different judicial opinions.
In In re Sears Holdings Corporation, the Second Circuit apparently ended a multi-year litigation by affirming the district court’s decision that the landlord’s appeal was “moot for lack of a remedy because, although [that] court [had properly] vacated the assignment and assumption of the lease …, the lease would not revert to [the landlord under Code] §365(d)(4), and that [the landlord] had no alternative remedy.”
Nearly 50 years has passed since the last major change in bankruptcy law. The financial landscape now where debtors go through bankruptcy is very different. Is the Bankruptcy Code still achieving its fundamental goals, and are there ways to improve it?
