One year ago, we wrote that the large business bankruptcy landscape in 2019 was generally shaped by economic, market, and leverage factors, with notable exceptions for disastrous wildfires, liabilities arising from the opioid crisis, price-fixing fallout, and corporate restructuring shenanigans.

The year 2020 was a different story altogether. The headline was COVID-19.

The pandemic may not have been responsible for every reversal of corporate fortune in 2020, but it weighed heavily on the scale, particularly for companies in the energy, retail, restaurant, entertainment, health care, travel, and hospitality industries. Mandatory shutdowns beginning in the spring of 2020 wreaked havoc on the bottom lines of thousands of companies confronting a precipitous drop in demand for their products and services. Some were able to weather the worst of the storm with packages of government assistance or by adapting their business models to meet the unique challenges of the pandemic. Others could not and either closed their doors or sought bankruptcy protection to attempt to restructure their balance sheets or sell their assets.