The American Bankruptcy Institute’s Subchapter V Task Force has issued its “Preliminary Report” on “Maintaining the $7,500,000 Debt Cap for Subchapter V Eligibility.” This article quotes from and summarizes the Report.

Recommendation

The Task Force recommends making permanent the $7,500,000 debt cap for Subchapter V eligibility, which is set to expire and revert to $3,024,725 on June 21, 2024.

Supporting Factors

Congress, the federal appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court all need to recognize this historical reality:

• bankruptcy is an efficient and effective tool for resolving mass tort cases, as demonstrated by cases with huge-majority approval votes from tort victims.

And all those institutions need to prevent anti-bankruptcy biases, legal technicalities, and hold-out groups from torpedoing the huge-majority votes.

Supreme Court moving in the right direction?

This is the fourth in a series of four articles on why Fed.R.Bankr.P. 9031, titled “Masters Not Authorized,” needs to be amended to authorize the utilization of special masters in complex bankruptcy cases.

The focus of this fourth article is on how federal courts have inherent authority to appoint special masters—and why that inherent authority should not be denied in bankruptcy cases.[Fn. 1]

Inherent Authority of Courts of Equity

This is the third in a series of four articles on why Fed.R.Bankr.P. 9031, titled “Masters Not Authorized,” needs to be amended to authorize the utilization of special masters in complex bankruptcy cases.

The focus of this third article is on how the evolution of the old bankruptcy referees into today’s bankruptcy courts shows why special masters are needed in complex bankruptcy cases—and should not have been prohibited.[Fn. 1]

The Evolution of Bankruptcy

This is the second in a series of four articles on why Fed.R.Bankr.P. 9031, titled “Masters Not Authorized,” needs to be amended to authorize the utilization of special masters in complex bankruptcy cases.

The focus of this second article is on how the exclusion of special masters from bankruptcy cases: (i) is without a sound reason, and (ii) is based on a history of haste and uncertainty.[Fn. 1]

Bankruptcy Rule 9031—The Prohibition

Can the contempt remedy for a creditor’s violations of the discharge injunction in multiple bankruptcy cases throughout the land be imposed in a class action lawsuit?

This ideal is floating around:

• upon removal of a Subchapter V debtor from possession, for fraud or other cause,
• the Subchapter V trustee has no expanded right, power, function or duty beyond operating debtor’s business (the “Ideal”).

This Ideal is both:

• contrary to unambiguous language of the Bankruptcy Code, as a matter of law; and
• in Never-Never Land, as a matter of practice.

I’ll try to explain.

This is a truism:

A study on using round-number offers and precise-number offers in negotiations reaches these two conclusions:

Here’s the latest opinion on a controversial question: In re Franco’s Paving LLC, Case No. 23-20069, Southern Texas Bankruptcy Court, (decided 10/5/2023; Doc. 74).

The Question & Answer

Voter apathy is a problem in Subchapter V cases. That apathy is in the form of creditors failing or refusing to vote on a Subchapter V plan. The In re Franco’s opinion addresses this apathy problem head-on.

Recent expressions of concern about courts mandating mediation reminded me of a mandated mediation process that worked well: the City of Detroit bankruptcy.

An illustration of the success of mandated mediation in the Detroit case is this line:

The Bankruptcy Judge“put an end to the public bickering over the water deal by ordering the parties into confidential mediation.”