Last week, the Supreme Court held in an 8-1 decision that the Bankruptcy Code “unequivocally abrogates the sovereign immunity” of federally recognized Indian tribes, including immunity to the automatic stay under § 362.

I was intrigued when I first heard about the pending Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Coughlin case at the ABI Spring Meeting back in April and probably overhyped it with my colleagues when I returned. As it turns out, the decision, like so many bankruptcy decisions from the Supreme Court, is a rather routine statutory analysis case, no matter how much Justice Gorsuch tries to make it more than that in his dissent.

Here’s a concise, if perfunctory, summary.

Continue Reading Supreme Court Holds That Indian Tribes are Subject to the Automatic Stay in Bankruptcy

Here’s this week’s Bankruptcy Quiz. This quiz will test your knowledge of bankruptcy deadlines and notice requirements. Click the image to take the quiz and enjoy!

Click here for prior quizzes.

If you enjoyed this post and would like to be the first to hear about new Bankruptcy Quizzes, then you can subscribe to Plan Proponent via email here.

Here’s this week’s Bankruptcy Quiz. This one is all about Supreme Court bankruptcy opinions and will test how much we were all listening at seminars over the last few years.

Click the image to take the quiz and enjoy!

If you enjoyed this post and would like to be the first to hear about new Bankruptcy Quizzes, then you can subscribe to Plan Proponent via email here.

While Plan Proponent is primarily about Chapter 11 confirmation issues, Subchapter V is becoming a bigger part of Stone & Baxter’s debtor practice, especially with the temporary $7.5 million debt limit. Thus, I’m going to experiment with providing short summaries of each month’s notable Subchapter V opinions. These are not going to be all-encompassing summaries. Rather, we’ll provide a roadmap of the issues and then you can click the cases if you want to dig deeper. We’ll start with May 2023.

Continue Reading Notable Subchapter V Bankruptcy Opinions: May 2023 Edition

Here’s this week’s Bankruptcy Quiz, just in time for me to leave for a short vacation. This one is all about Subchapter V bankruptcy cases. I hope it’s a little easier than last week’s quiz.

(I used Judge Paul Bonapfel’s excellent and unrivaled treatise, A Guide to the Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019, to inspire the questions and verify the answers.)

Click the image to take the quiz and enjoy!

If you enjoyed this post and would like to be the first to hear about new Bankruptcy Quizzes, then you can subscribe to Plan Proponent via email here.

Two Christmases ago, we posted about Judge Colleen McMahon‘s (SDNY) 142-page opinion reversing the plan confirmation order in the Purdue Pharma Chapter 11 bankruptcy appeal on the basis that its non-consensual third-party releases were improper under the Bankruptcy Code. Today however, the Second Circuit entered a 97-page opinion (including a concurrence) reversing the District Court’s opinion and affirming the Bankruptcy Court’s approval of the Purdue Pharma plan (and its releases of the Sacklers).

I’ll summarize the high points in this post, with an option of coming back to it.

Continue Reading Second Circuit Upholds Third-Party Releases for the Sacklers in Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Appeal

I don’t know about you, but I enjoy taking harmless online quizzes. “Test your knowledge of this week’s headlines” or “See how many of these movies you can recognize.” Well, I bet some of you Type A lawyers, judges, professors, and potential clients (who Googled everything about Chapter 11) fancy yourselves bankruptcy experts and want to prove it.

With that in mind, I thought it would be “fun” to end each week with a Bankruptcy Quiz, at least for as long as this inexperienced quizmaster can come up with questions and (correct) answers. Thus, here’s Plan Proponent’s first weekly Bankruptcy Quiz.

This first one is confirmation-related because that’s our focus and most of these questions are the questions I posed to Gary Marsh’s students this Spring in his Emory Law Complex Restructuring class. They’re super-smart and well-taught and, motivated by prizes (including a full bag of ABI Southeast giveaways), they had no problem tackling these somewhat tricky § 1129 questions. I’ll mix it up and shorten the answers in future quizzes.

Click the image to take the quiz and enjoy!

If you enjoyed this post and would like to be the first to hear about new Bankruptcy Quizzes, then you can subscribe to Plan Proponent via email here.

It’s finally time to wrap-up this New Year’s series. As I mentioned in Part 1, I thought it would be fun use the Wayback Machine to take a look back at how professional websites—law firm sites, in particular—have evolved over the last 25 years. It’s my way of saying Thank You to those I’ve worked with and those who have supported the blog over the last 8 years.

In Part 1, I focused on the big national firms. In Part 2, I focused on organizations I’ve been a part of since 1994 and firms in Middle Georgia.

In Part 3, I’ll mainly focus on Atlanta firms with bankruptcy departments, large and small.

The larger firms get a longer look in this series only because their sites were generally established earlier (meaning they likely had funnier content) and indexed more frequently than the smaller firms (meaning more content is available). The larger firms were also the starting point for so many of our Georgia friends before they went out on their own.

I must note that there were so many firms that I wanted to cover and I looked into pretty deeply but ultimately couldn’t cover due to indexing issues. If you see your logo in the picture but didn’t see any coverage, then just know I tried really hard.

(As a reminder, many of the website photos below are clickable but warning that the Archive seems to be down intermittently this morning.)

Continue Reading Happy New Year! – Looking Back on 25 Years of Professional Websites – Part 3

Welcome back to my multi-part New Year’s post.

As I mentioned in Part 1, as Stone & Baxter was wrapping up its 25th year and Plan Proponent posted its 99th post in 2021, I thought it would be fun use the Wayback Machine to take a look back at how professional websites—law firm sites, in particular—have evolved over the last 25 years. It’s my way of saying Thank You to those I’ve worked with and those who have supported the blog for the last 7 years.

In Part 1, I focused on the big national firms. Naturally, King & Spalding’s 2001 Recruiting Bloopers Reel was the star attraction. That post had relatively broad appeal and was even noticed by the leading legal tech journalist in the U.S.

In Part 2, I’ll leave the big firms, the Atlanta firms, and the cringe behind until Part 3. Instead, I’ll focus on organizations I’ve been a part of since 1994 and firms in Middle Georgia.

Continue Reading Happy New Year! – Looking Back on 25 Years of Professional Websites – Part 2

This long overdue New Year’s post, which I actually started in December 2021, will have nothing to do with serious work stuff. Instead, as Stone & Baxter was wrapping up its 25th year and Plan Proponent posted its 99th post, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at how professional websites—law firm sites, in particular—have evolved over the last 25 years.

First, it’s a long, multi-part Thank You to those I’ve worked with and those who have supported the blog for the last 7 years. Second, it’s a nostalgia piece that only the internet can provide. Third, it’s a New Year’s reminder to stay humble. After all, even mega law firms, now with $1 billion in annual revenues each, once thought it was good marketing to display gavels, click counters, guestbooks, recruiting blooper reels, and even a Yahtzee game on their fancy-for-the-times 90s websites. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I’ve got the receipts!

I hope you enjoy this series even slightly as much as I did. Happy New Year!

Continue Reading Happy New Year! – Looking Back on 25 Years of Professional Websites – Part 1