Cover Story The Bankruptcy Strategist

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?

Word that the historic French franchise Girondins de Bordeaux filed for bankruptcy recently rocked European football. But one force in particular poses an even broader threat to the sustainability of the elite level of French soccer than relegation: media rights.

At the motion to dismiss stage, courts usually won't consider affirmative defenses. This issue arose recently in a preferential transfer case, where a defendant sought to dismiss a complaint by arguing it was a mere conduit, not an initial transferee.