UCLA Law Professor Lynn LoPucki has graciously agreed to permit me to live-blog the Big-Bankruptcy Empirical Research Agenda conference he has organized today at UCLA.
For those few who don't know, the Bankruptcy Research Database is one of the most important tools available to scholars and practitioners interested in understanding patterns in chapter 11 cases. It captures a great deal of information about essentially every large public company that has commenced a chapter 11 case under the current Bankruptcy Code.
The holy grail of all bankruptcy scholarship is figuring out whether a case was successful. Conventional wisdom might say that confirming a chapter 11 plan—and paying the professionals in full—is good enough.
But, we know that many companies file again, despite having confirmed a plan, and that may not necessarily be evidence that the plan was a failure: circumstances change, etc. Conversely, the confirmed plan may, in hindsight, prove much worse than other possible deals: Perhaps a 363 sale would have produced greater recoveries for creditors.