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Business Restructuring, Creditors’ Rights & Bankruptcy

The extensive experience of Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek S.C.'s Business Restructuring, Creditors’ Rights & Bankruptcy Team extends to all matters that concern advising, consulting or doing business with financially troubled enterprises. This experience includes every variety of state and federal insolvency proceedings, Chapter 11 and 7 bankruptcies, workouts and restructurings. We have represented lenders, creditors' committees, suppliers, lessors, purchasers, equity holders, corporate and individual creditors and debtors.

Our bankruptcy attorneys understand and perform services in substantive financial areas of law involving secured and unsecured lending, asset-based lending, real estate financing, banking and Uniform Commercial Code (UCC). This considerable experience, combined with our commercial litigation background, provides our clients with a combination of procedural experience in business reorganization workouts or bankruptcies and substantial knowledge of credit facilities and financial restructuring.

Our Approach

While we believe it is important to represent our clients aggressively, we find that possessing the reputation and flexibility to reach a cost effective business solution is equally important. These are especially vital "differences" that we bring to our representation of clients in bankruptcies and workouts. Thinking "outside the box" to achieve a solution is one of our strengths. Our approach to the organization of our bankruptcy and workout area makes us particularly good at this. Our attorneys developed substantive business negotiating skills through their experience not only in litigation but in commercial finance and commercial transactions where many of them began their careers.
 
When appropriate, we make use of our Business & Commercial Litigation Team , although our business reorganization attorneys regularly engage in commercial litigation involving issues such as priorities, preferences, fraudulent transfers, foreclosures, fraud and nondischargeability, UCC rights and similar litigation.

Additionally, our practice has a proven record of interacting with the other practice disciplines in the firm. It draws upon the special resources and experience offered by practice areas including litigation, tax, corporate securities, lending and environmental.

Representative Engagements

Our Business Restructuring, Creditors’ Rights & Bankruptcy Team has represented many regional and national clients in some notable reorganizations.

Members of this team have:
  • Served as counsel to the largest known unsecured creditor with a claim exceeding $70 million. We successfully defeated a pre-package plan of reorganization and disclosure statement that attempted to release the debtor’s claims against the insiders and others who precipitated the Chapter 11 filing through a disastrous leveraged buyout.
  • Represented the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors in In re P.A. Bergner, the largest bankruptcy proceeding ever filed in this district and one of the largest in the country. The case involved innumerable litigated disputes, including several questions of first impression involving the bankruptcy court’s jurisdiction to modify the rights of personal injury plaintiffs injured in department stores located in so-called “direct action” states.
  • Represented a group of banks in a complex workout followed by a Chapter 11. The banks achieved 100 percent recovery on a $100 million facility despite the possibility of substantial exposure in a conventional liquidation.

Our Team

Our technical expertise and ability extends to the most sophisticated transactions. We believe that quality must expand into all aspects of operations. To that end, we take great pride in the contributions of our support and technical staff through their expert use of our state-of-the-art word processing, document management and time and billing systems. These efforts allow us to manage our work efficiently and complete our projects in a timely, professional manner.

We structure our transactions to make them the most advantageous to our clients. We use our expertise and our focus on results to formulate new ideas for achieving the client’s goals.  Our ultimate goal at WHD is the success of our client.