Federal bankruptcy law can benefit debtors and creditors alike. Provisions such as the automatic stay and absolute priority ensure a streamlined proceeding, preserving the debtor’s scarce resources for business rehabilitation and creditor repayment.  The alternative, multiple state court debt enforcement actions, would waste the debtor’s time and money on litigation (as valuable as bankruptcy lawyers may be). 

In the latest installment of our “Breaking the Code” series, we take a look at the rarely-mentioned section 108(c) of the Bankruptcy Code, which governs the effect of certain deadlines relating to nonbankruptcy legal actions:

Finding out you missed an important deadline is the stuff nightmares are made of.  Even more so for attorneys, where letting a court imposed deadline pass without taking the requisite action may substantially hinder the rights of clients.  In 

We hope you are emerging from your sugar coma and ready for some easy to digest morsels of the Weil Bankruptcy Blog.  With this entry, we summarize the blog entries from the second half of October. 

In a Twist, Court Finds That Junior Stakeholders Violated Their Implied Duties Under an Indenture

Congress made clear in its enactment of section 503(b)(3)(D) of the Bankruptcy Code that, to the extent a creditor makes a substantial contribution in a chapter 9 or chapter 11 bankruptcy case, that creditor should be rewarded.  Because the reward — reimbursement of fees and expenses as administrative expenses of the estate —

Some bankruptcy cases can have long tails with issues developing years after the entities confirm their chapter 11 plans.  That seems to be particularly true when cases deal with mass torts.  As the recent case of Piper Aircraft Corporation demonstrates, an issue can arise in a chapter 11 case over twenty years after the debtor’s plan was confirmed.  In

The High Court in London gave judgment on parts A and B of the Lehman Waterfall II Application on 31 July 2015.  The application is part of the ongoing dispute as to the distribution of the estimated surplus of more than £7 billion in the main Lehman operating company in Europe, Lehman Brothers International (Europe) (LBIE).

Benjamin Franklin is quoted as having said “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”  No offense to Mr. Franklin, but we had always thought that there was at least one other certainty in this world—in a bankruptcy case, creditors get paid pursuant to the priority scheme under section 507(a) of the Bankruptcy Code.  It turns out, however, that Mr.

The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in (Re) Indalex has changed the landscape for both lenders and borrowers in Canada who sponsor registered defined benefit pension plans. For lenders, carefully drafted loan documentation and effective planning can enhance the protection of a secured lender’s position in the face of the broadened scope of a deemed trust applicable to a borrower’s defined benefit pension obligations.

On 12 March 2010, the FSA published the statement that it had provided to the court appointed examiner of Lehman Brothers Holding Inc, which is referred to in his wider report on the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

View FSA statement to the US bankruptcy court examiner on the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, 12 March 2010