Over the past several years, unitranche facilities have become increasingly prevalent. This growth has been driven by the ever-growing class of private credit and direct lenders who initially developed the unitranche facility structure, along with traditional bank lenders now joining this market. The unitranche structure has several advantages, including typically quicker execution for the parties involved and in some cases a lower cost of capital to the borrower.

Secured lenders are troubled at the recent news that a New York state court judge denied a preliminary injunction request filed in the Supreme Court of New York by a group of dissenting first-lien lenders, seeking to prevent a borrower, Serta Simmons, and certain first-lien consenting lenders from entering into a recapitalization transaction. In exchange for the purchase of the consenting lenders’ debt at a discount, the consenting lenders received new super-priority debt ranking ahead of the non-consenting lenders’ debt.

Yesterday, in an 8-1 decision, the US Supreme Court held in Mission Product Holdings, Inc. v.

In the case of In re: Exide Technologies, decided on June 1, 2010, the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed two lower court decisions and held that a 1991 agreement between Exide Technologies and EnerSys Delaware Inc., which included a license to EnerSys for use of the “EXIDE” trademark, is not an executory contract that can be rejected by Exide in bankruptcy proceedings.