When many bankruptcy practitioners think of § 546 of the Bankruptcy Code, it is in connection with the statute of limitations for avoidance actions. While these provisions may be widely known, § 546 contains several other provisions that can have a substantial impact on a party’s substantive rights in a bankruptcy case.
A Federal Rule of Bankruptcy Procedure 2004 examination is commonly referred to as a “fishing expedition”[1] into a debtor’s financial affairs. Debtors, trustees and creditors routinely use Rule 2004 exams to investigate an examinee’s financial affairs with very little interference by bankruptcy courts or discovery rule limitations.
Your client has been providing products to a customer for years. The client is not paid directly by its customer, but by the customer’s parent company as part of a cash-management system (CMS), what the customer describes as an enterprise-wide pooled account. After a couple of turbulent months with irregular payments, the customer files for bankruptcy.
Two recent opinions — one from the Lehman Brothers case and the other from the Spansion case — provide new guidance on whether individual committee members and unofficial committees may request attorneys’ fees on the basis of substantial contribution.
Section 330 of the Bankruptcy Code permits a court to authorize reasonable compensation for actual and necessary services. Courts within the Fifth Circuit are bound by In re Pro-Snax Distributors Inc., which held that services are compensable under § 330, but only if the applicant proves that the services resulted in a benefit to the bankruptcy estate.[1] A recent decision by a panel of the Fifth Circuit demonstrates that Pro-Snax continues to be binding precedent, but the panel took the extraordinary step of unanimously recommending that the Fifth Circuit revisit Pro-Snax en banc.[2]
Editor’s Note: This two-part article discusses how the U.K. and U.S. have become the two main jurisdictions where debtors outside of such jurisdictions (foreign debtors) have been able to successfully restructure their businesses.
The “presumption against extraterritoriality” is a statutory canon of construction that embodies the “longstanding principle of American law that legislation of Congress, unless a contrary intent appears, is meant to apply only within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”[1] Stated simply, it provides that “[w]hen a statu
[1]A powerful and commonly utilized tool in a restructuring is the commencement by a company of an insolvency proceeding, whether under the Bankruptcy Code or analogous law, in order to achieve desired changes to its capital structure and/or operations.
Editor's Note: Maria Michelle Nisce is a 2014 J.D./M.B.A. candidate at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law and Lee Business School.
In an issue of first impression in the MF Global Inc. liquidation proceedings under the Securities Investor Protection Act of 1970 (SIPA), Judge Martin Glenn of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York held that payments to non-attorney professionals hired by a SIPA trustee need only be approved by the Securities Investor Protection Corp.
