Business

Luncheon Keynote at the Annual Spring Meeting

This panel will focus on the continuing role of creditors’ committees in the current chapter 11 environment. As the fulcrum of security moves up the balance sheet, the utility of committees has been coming under attack. Although historically committees have consisted primarily of trade creditors, they now regularly include bondholders, indenture trustees, the PBGC and unions. Learn about the challenges for professionals representing committees and the way committee members evaluate how to fulfill their fiduciary duties.

After you have found your valuation expert, how do you know that the expert’s report is accurate? This panel will discuss some of the red flags that should cause you to raise some questions with your own expert (or consider asking the other side’s expert in cross-examination), and will discuss how organization might make it easier or harder to catch red flags.

This panel will address the entitlement of a secured lender with a "blanket lien" on a company’s assets to share in the going concern or enterprise value of that company when it is liquidated in a § 363 sale or otherwise dealt with under a chapter 11 plan. The circumstances under which such sharing in “going concern” value has been permitted, the cases on both sides of the issue, and the policy arguments in favor of and against the secured lenders’ right to access such value to satisfy its secured claim will be explored.

How do different constituencies “play” the same valuation issue? This panel will explore how and why valuation is an art and not a science in chapter 11, and will take on the challenge of debating whether or not this should trouble us as bankruptcy professionals and investors.