Litigation

Preserving Privilege in the Wake of SEC v. Herrera and the Government's Increasing Leverage to Obtain Such Disclosures

A Magistrate Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida held that an “oral download” of outside counsel's interview notes to the SEC resulted in a limited waiver of protection under the attorney work-product doctrine over the underlying interview notes and memoranda. The decision is a significant one, and underscores one of the core challenges facing companies seeking to cooperate with the government during the course of its investigations.

Town Entitled To Injunctive Relief for Violation of Certificate of Occupancy

Two heads of a tech company that raised tens of millions through an initial coin offering for what was sold as the world's first multi-blockchain debit card now face federal civil and criminal charges for allegedly defrauding investors.

Settlement proceeds from a writers' dispute involving the film Olympus Has Fallen must be further divided pursuant to one of the writer's divorce agreements, the Pennsylvania Superior Court has ruled.

Bankruptcy is a fact of life in the United States. When it happens, the treatment of a lease as either residential or non-residential may be crucial to all parties -- landlords, tenants, subtenants and their counselors.

As of Jan. 1, 2018, each jointly administered debtor with quarterly disbursements of at least $1,000,000 must pay a fee of 1% of all disbursements, up to $250,000 per quarter. Although this change in the law was only intended to address shortfalls in UST funding, it has taken a little-noticed component of bankruptcy and magnified it into a ticking tax-bomb for unsuspecting debtors and their lenders.

In a recent decision, Bankruptcy Judge Christopher S. Sontchi addressed the question of whether a Chapter 11 debtor, the tenant under a commercial lease, could exercise an option to renew the lease during the bankruptcy proceedings, even though the debtor was in default under the lease and the lease specified that it could not be renewed if defaults existed at the time the option was exercised.

In a case of first impression at the circuit level, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that section 1129(a)(10) of the Bankruptcy Code — which requires a favorable vote of at least one impaired class of creditors in order to confirm a Chapter 11 plan — applies on a “per-plan” basis, rather than a “per-debtor” basis.