Fairness & Solvency Opinions Shouldn't Be Overlooked Amid Restructuring Wave
Asset Protection 101: Are You and Your Family Protected from Litigation, Creditors, and Divorce?
Bill on Bankruptcy: Rakoff Reverses Himself in Madoff Case
Once upon a time a good way to commit oil patch theft was to back a truck up to the tank battery in the middle of the night, fill ‘er up, and drive off into the darkness. In re: Black Elk Energy Offshore Operations LLC shows...more
Here we go again. Precisely one hour and thirty-nine minutes after the dismissal of the bankruptcy filing of LTL, Johnson & Johnson’s artificially created talc-liability subsidiary, the company was right back at it again with...more
This Term, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted certiorari in Siegel v. Fitzgerald (In re Circuit City Stores, Inc.), 996 F.3d 156 (4th Cir. 2021), cert. granted, No. 21-441 (U.S. Jan. 10, 2022), in order to resolve the growing...more
In In re Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, 12 F.4th 171 (2d Cir. 2021), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit revived litigation filed by the trustee administering the assets of defunct investment firm...more
In the latest chapter of more than a decade of litigation involving efforts to recover fictitious profits paid to certain customers of Bernard Madoff's defunct brokerage firm as part of the largest Ponzi scheme in history,...more
GE Energy Power Conversion France SAS, Corp. v. Outokumpu Stainless USA, LLC, Case No. 18–1048 (2020). Equitable estoppel principles (such as non-signatories being able to compel arbitration of disputes) can be applied in...more
Answering “no” to a certified question from the Fifth Circuit, the Supreme Court of Texas held that a transferee on inquiry notice of fraud cannot shield itself from clawback without diligently investigating its initial...more
Fraudulent transfer law allows creditors and bankruptcy trustees, under certain circumstances, to sue transferees to recover funds received where a debtor’s transfers to the transferees actually or constructively defrauded...more
Bass, Berry & Sims attorney Chris Lazarini analyzed a case in which a former investment advisor at UBS sought to prevent the company from collecting on promissory notes the advisor owed to UBS upon his departure. After the...more
The District Court for the Northern District of Texas recently held in Segner v. Ruthven Oil & Gas, LLC, No. 3:12-CV-1318-B, 2018 WL 3155827 (N.D. Tex. June 28, 2018) that failure to comply with a disclosure law when...more
A recent ruling of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals resulted in an otherwise secured lender’s claim being rendered unsecured because the lender ignored warning signs casting doubt on the debtor’s right to pledge the...more
The Seventh Circuit (which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) appears to have added a new and potentially conflicting standard in analyzing a third-party transferee’s “good faith” defense to a fraudulent transfer...more
Lending credence to the old adage “if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is,” the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently held that a secured lender was on inquiry notice of possible fraud by its borrower in...more
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently held that a lender is obligated to conduct a diligent investigation when it becomes aware of suspicious facts relating to the legitimacy of a loan transaction. In Sentinel...more
The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently issued a decision which may give a trump card to fraudulent transfer defendants seeking to use the “good faith” defense under the Bankruptcy Code’s recovery provision....more
Receivers handling Ponzi schemes and fraud cases are familiar with the concept of suing the “winners” in the scheme to recover transfers made to them in excess of their investment. Such suits are based on the theory that the...more
When a debtor pays the market cost for goods and services provided to it by third-party vendors, these payments normally cannot be recovered as fraudulent transfers in the U.S. That is because the debtor receives reasonably...more