The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware has affirmed a bankruptcy court order which approved both a sale of the debtors’ assets and the establishment of an escrow account, which essentially provides a “gift” to fund a distribution to the debtors’ unsecured creditors.  What is significant about this order is that it approved the use of gifting in a chapter 11 bankruptcy case.

An executive’s right to severance payments isn’t always written in stone, even if his employer agrees to provide them.  In this post, we described how one exec lost his severance pay after the Federal Reserve decided that his employer, a bank, was in a “troubled condition” at the time.

Purchasers beware: sometimes less is not more. As the successful bidder in 

Recently, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) filed a limited objection in bankruptcy court to the proposed sale of assets of ConnectEdu, Inc. (“ConnectEdu”) on the grounds that the company’s privacy policy protecting customer personal information had potentially not been complied with.

As one bankruptcy court has said, “[b]ecause deals are the heart and soul of the [c]hapter 11 process, bankruptcy courts enforce them as cut by the parties.” Unfortunately, however, deals do not always turn out as the parties expected and there is sometimes litigation to determine what exactly was bargained for in a chapter 11 plan.

Real estate lenders should be aware of a 

The staff of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection recently sent a letter to the court handling ConnectEdu’s bankruptcy proceedings and sale of assets, which may include their customer’s personal information.

A recent decision out of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington will be of interest to both lenders and borrowers of loans that are expected to be traded. In Meridian Sunrise Village, LLC v.

Earlier this week, the Third Circuit affirmed a federal bankruptcy court’s dismissal of a mesothelioma claim against a bankrupt oil company that arose as an adversary proceeding fifteen years after the bankruptcy plan was confirmed and discharged all outstanding claims.  The Circuit held that because the parties conceded the claim arose at the time of the victim’s asbestos exposure, which pre-dated the defendant’s bankruptcy, a

Best practices are higher standards than those set by state law fiduciary duties, federal sentencing guidelines and a maze of other laws including: