In May, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a much anticipated decision in Garvin v. Cook Investments NW, SPNWY, LLC, 922 F.3d 1031 (9th Cir.
Last month, a federal district court affirmed a bankruptcy court’s ruling that an ex-NFL player’s potential future recovery from a concussion-related class action settlement agreement was shielded from the reach of creditors in the former player’s Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceeding. The ruling turned on the bankruptcy court’s finding that the potential future settlement payments were more akin to a disability benefit, which is exempt under Florida law, than a standard tort settlement, which is not.
Background
Cash flow is the life blood of the construction industry, goes the mantra. Construction projects often have long supply chains. When cash stops flowing down the chain, businesses can fail. There is all too much recent evidence of this.
Someone in the chain (say, a main contractor) could seek to provide in a contract that it does not have to pay the party below (subcontractor) until it has been paid by the party above (employer). This is a 'pay-when-paid' clause.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit recently examined and then clarified and set forth the test for evaluating the appealability of bankruptcy orders in an opinion released in the case Ritzen Group v. Jackson Masonry. In doing so, the appellate court reaffirmed the “longstanding and textually-compelled rule of [a] looser finality” standard in bankruptcy as compared to general civil litigation, and concluded that a denial of a motion to lift stay was a final appealable order subject to the fourteen-day appeals period established in Bankruptcy Rule 8002(a).
Recently, in the Advance Watch bankruptcy, the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that a bankruptcy judge is authorized to enter a final default judgment in an adversary proceeding against a foreign defendant who failed to respond to a validly-served summons and complaint, in spite of being an Article I judge.[1] Notably, the court found that the recent Supreme Court decision, Wellness International Network, Ltd. v. Sharif, 135 S. Ct. 1932 (2015), a further iteration of the Stern v.
Recently, in Anderson v.
Recent caselaw demonstrates that there is a current judicial disagreement over whether the Bankruptcy Code will permit a cramdown in a jointly-administered bankruptcy case when a consenting class exists for only one of the debtors. This implicates the important issue of de facto substantive consolidation and the potential risks it poses to unsecured creditors.