LJN Newsletters

Cases of interest to you and your practice.

Bankruptcy filings make headlines, regardless of whether the debtor is a large public company, a small private business, a national icon or a local not-for-profit. And media coverage -- and the public and political scrutiny it invites - can influence, for better or worse, the course of the case. It can even affect the very future of the organization. As the legal, operational and financial strategies associated with the bankruptcy process are put in place, communications must be an integral component.

Lenders won a victory on Aug. 15 when the Third Circuit limited the equitable remedy of substantive consolidation in the Owens Corning reorganization case. In re Owens Corning, ____ F.3d ___, 2005 U.S. App. LEXIS 17150*1 (3d Cir. 2005), amended by 2005 U.S. App. LEXIS 18043 (3d Cir. Aug. 23, 2005); further amended Sept. 2, 2005, petitions for reh'g en banc filed Aug. 29, 2005. Reversing the district court, the court held that "affiliated [debtor and non-debtor] entities" could not be "substantively" consolidated on the facts of the case before it. According to the court, the debtor and its allies sought substantive consolidation, a "last-resort remedy," in order to "deprive one group of creditors [ie, the unsecured lenders] of their rights while providing a windfall to other creditors." Id. at *5-*6. The future claimants' representative and a creditors' committee filed petitions for rehearing en banc on Aug. 29. Answers to those petitions were due to be filed by Sept. 12.

There has been much discussion among bankruptcy practitioners and scholars as to whether the courts have abdicated their responsibility to enforce the Bankruptcy Code and whether debtors and creditors committees are too easily pressured by lenders such that control of bankruptcy cases has been effectively ceded to secured creditors. One of the areas where many would say this is most prevalent is with post-petition lending.

With a multiplicity of advanced decision support tools now available to law firm managers, it's important not to lose sight of key criteria for appraising all such systems. To facilitate effective decision-making, the designers and implementers of any reporting or BI system should aspire to these attributes: decision usefulness, relevance, reliability, timeliness and understandability.

So what's all this excitement about Business Intelligence? You already have a pretty good report writer built right into your time-and-billing system. Your vendor provides over 50 pre-designed reports, each with selection options. Moreover, you have someone on staff that knows Crystal Report Writer. Isn't this all you need?
No, it's not. Today's law firm managers need more powerful and flexible access to financial information than canned or even custom-programmed report writers can deliver.

Accounting and other enterprise systems amass information that is, almost by definition, not actionable by front-line lawyers. Volume of data is inherently at odds with actionability, and a good enterprise system must accommodate volume. It must account for every circumstance, every variable, every iteration. Much of this volume is chaff to lawyers. To be useful, the wheat must be winnowed out and presented to the pricing and staffing decision makers themselves (ie, not just to green eyeshade types deep in the firm).

[Editor's Note: I've appreciated the cooperation and restraint of all authors in not dwelling on the sales points for their particular Business Intelligence…