A written tour of business bankruptcy and its alternatives A typical commercial litigation case involves a judge, a plaintiff, and a defendant. A typical commercial bankruptcy case also has a judge, but that’s about where the similarities stop. A typical commercial litigation case, you see, is a two-party dispute. A typical commercial bankruptcy case is anything but. Who are the parties? The company that files the bankruptcy is the debtor (once a chapter 11 petition is filed, the debtor is called the debtor-in-possession). And, a debtor can have any number of creditors, each […]

The bankruptcy case of the Spokane Country Club (“SCC” the “Club” or the “Debtor”) is a very interesting study of how the bankruptcy process has not only been used to disrupt the collection efforts of plaintiff creditors who have already been awarded a judgment, but also to essentially negate significant policy changes for a club that had been stipulated to in a state court proceeding. The Club was founded in Spokane, Washington in 1898. Spokane is located on the far eastern side of Washington State, closer to Missoula, MT than to Seattle. The city […]

In part one of our series on recharacterization, we discussed the elements of judicial recharacterization of loans as equity interests.[i]  In part two of the series, we considered how debtors can “claw back” putative “loans” that they may have repaid years earlier because the “loans” were in fact equity investments and their repayment was invalid.[ii]  In this finale of the series, we contrast recharacterization with equitable subordination, which is another means by which some creditors can seek to push ahead of others. Equitable subordination resembles recharacterization in that it permits […]