The filing of a bankruptcy case imposes an “automatic stay” that protects debtors from creditors attempting to pursue litigation against them. Creditors may in turn ask the bankruptcy court to lift the stay. But if that request is denied, must a creditor wait for months or years until the entire bankruptcy case is over before it can finally appeal the bankruptcy court’s denial of its request to lift the stay?

For almost 30 years, owners and licensees of intellectual property had no firm answer to this important question: if the owner of a trademark rejects a license agreement in bankruptcy, does the licensee then lose its right to use the mark? The United States Supreme Court has now settled that question in favor of licensees in Mission Product Holdings, Inc. v. Tempnology, LLC (U.S. May 20, 2019), by ruling that the owner may not, by rejecting the license, extinguish the licensee's right to use the licensed mark.

Bankruptcy debtors receive a “fresh start” with a discharge of debts, except for certain debts arising from fraud. But in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Lamar, Archer & Cofrin, LLP v.

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court in Merit Management Group, LP v. FTI Consulting, Inc., 2018 WL 1054879 (Feb. 27, 2018) has made it easier for bankruptcy trustees to claw back money received as part of certain transactions, while emphasizing that bankruptcy law still protects the financial institutions that facilitate those transactions. The transfers at issue in Merit Management were not a debtor’s ordinary loan payments to a lender.

At a time when billions of dollars of assets are under the supervision of federal receivers and bankruptcy trustees, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently ruled in favor of an equity receiver and held that in proposing her plan of distribution to investors, she was not bound by the requirements of state law when establishing priorities for and making distributions to investors.