View All PracticesBankruptcy, Receivership and Creditors' Rights
Areas of Concentration
- Creditors’ rights in insolvency proceedings.
- Counseling clients on insolvency issues.
- Litigation and dispute resolution.
- Lender liability.
- Workouts.
For wide-ranging corporations with complicated insolvency issues requiring sophisticated counseling, we work to make our clients’ practical objectives our own. Applying extensive experience and know-how, we vigorously and effectively assert creditors’ claims and resolve other insolvency issues in federal and state proceedings across numerous jurisdictions, winning significant monies for our clients. We’ve successfully represented not only senior secured creditors but also junior lien holders and unsecured creditors in high-stakes insolvencies, preference actions and fraudulent conveyance actions.
In addition to representing creditors, we have also represented debtors in state receivership cases and insolvency proceedings. We put our deep understanding of bankruptcy law to work in counseling clients on issues that impact their bottom-line: the relative merits of various insolvency proceedings, how best to do business with a financially troubled entity, lender liability questions, tax matters arising from insolvency proceedings, and environmental concerns related to acquiring debtor assets.
We also stand ready to aggressively litigate any disputes arising out of insolvency, such as fraud and breach of fiduciary duty, and to deftly handle real estate conveyances. And while we have built our reputation on spirited creditor representation, we also serve as counsel for Chapter 11 trustees, aggressively prosecuting varied proceedings to recover assets and defend the priority of trustees’ claims.
Representative Matters
- For the quasi-public Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC), we worked to recover a defaulted $30 million loan to Alpha-Beta Technology. Thanks to our extensive experience in insolvency matters and familiarity with Rhode Island receivership law, we were able to forestall an attempted assignment for benefit for creditors in Massachusetts by instituting a receivership proceeding in Rhode Island. As a result—and due to our vigorous representation of RIEDC during the proceeding—the debtor’s assets were liquidated at a fair price and RIEDC was paid a substantial amount toward its claim.
- In representing the bankruptcy trustee of a failed mortgage institution, AP&S attorneys handled a number of difficult real estate conveyance issues, including one that involved fraud, breach of fiduciary duty and constructive trust, resulting in a $2 million-plus judgment for the trustee. Thanks to our efforts, significant monies were recovered from the fraudulent principal, assets liquidated and creditors paid a dividend.
- Another complex RIEDC case involved two types of collateral—one where only the first priority creditor had a lien and another where both the first-secured creditor and RIEDC, as second-priority secured creditor, had liens. Faced with the possibility of liquidated collateral thus going to unsecured creditors and not the RIEDC, AP&S lawyers successfully argued to the bankruptcy court that the RIEDC—rather than unsecured creditors—should receive the proceeds from the joint collateral. As a result, our client was paid a substantial amount on its claim.
