Since the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was signed into law by President Bush on April 20, 2005, much of the focus has been on the impacts on consumer bankruptcies.
Below are brief descriptions of amendment provisions which will impact chapter 11 business cases.
– Nonresidential Real Property Leases
Under the current law, debtors could [...]

We regularly encounter the issue of whether a bankruptcy court will treat a document entitled “Lease” (of either personalty or real estate) as a true lease or a disguised financing. The Seventh Circuit ruled on July 26, 2005 in the United Airlines case that a transaction where an airline obtained money to build/improve an [...]

The District of Columbia Bar has posted an interesting article on the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. In particular, the article compares the Bankruptcy Code changes to the original intent of the Bankruptcy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and highlights some of the law’s more controversial aspects.
http://www.dcbar.org/for_lawyers/washington_lawyer/august_2005/bankruptcy.cfm
Mac McMahan

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has issued an interesting opinion discussing the interplay between state and federal law regarding successor liability. In Mickowski v. Visi-Trak Worldwide, LLC, Case No. 04-3889 (Opinion filed July 13, 2005), the Sixth Circuit decided that an asset purchaser did not acquire liability on a patent infringement [...]

I am happy to note that we have received several nice comments about the new blog. One question came up that I want to address: “how do you have the time to do this?” The answer is simple: first, everyone takes a turn writing something so it never becomes an effort for any one [...]

Where does the word “bankrupt” come from? Simply looking at the word, one associates “bank” with the root “rupt”, as in rupture, corrupt, abrupt.
But the origin actually has more to do with the Ponte Vecchio, the famed medieval bridge in Florence, Italy than it does with a ruptured bank.
The Ponte Vecchio was [...]

In bankruptcy litigation, “contemporaneous exchange for new value” is an enumerated defense to an action to avoid preferential transfers. New value is defined in Section 547(a)(2) as “money or money’s worth in goods, services, or new credit, or release by a transferee of property previously transferred to such transferee…including proceeds of such property.” [...]

JMM P.C.’s Mac McMahan was quoted in the August 2005 edition of Bloomberg Markets Magazine in an article relating to a consumer’s perspective on SBC’s purchase of AT&T and the expansion of its subscriber services. The current issue can be found at http://www.bloomberg.com/media/markets/current_issue.html
The specific article can be found at http://www.bloomberg.com/media/markets/sbc.pdf
Mike

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has published an opinion reinforcing the principle that debtors are not entitled to a discharge of student loan debt absent a showing of undue hardship. In Alderete v. Educational Credit Management Corp., Case No. 04-2109 (Opinion filed June 29, 2005), the court reversed a bankruptcy court [...]

When Congress recently passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (S. 256), it applied different effective dates to the various Bankruptcy Code changes. Although the bulk of the changes will go into effect on October 17, 2005, some changes became effective on April 20, when the President signed the bill into [...]