Our lawyers have extensive experience advising company-side clients, including their boards, independent directors and C-suite executive management teams, in the following areas:
- Determining optimal restructuring paths, including out-of-court workouts, forbearance agreements, and prepackaged, prearranged or traditional Chapter 11 processes
- Navigating bankruptcy while ensuring compliance with fiduciary duties and other corporate governance responsibilities
- Negotiating with prepetition financial creditors, trade and other nonfinancial creditors, and equity holders
- Securing debtor-in-possession financing packages
- Negotiating and restructuring multiple tranches of loan facilities with financial creditors
- Structuring rights offerings and other new liquidity solutions
- Designing employee retention and other business stabilization programs
- Conducting 363 sales of nonessential business lines
- Negotiating and documenting plans of reorganization with a wide array of official creditor committees and other constituencies
- Developing and implementing a strategic plan for the sale of assets and businesses, whether noncore or consisting of substantially all the business assets, to maximize value
We advise our clients throughout all stages of the process, harmonizing competing interests and often arriving at workable solutions without the need to litigate. However, when litigation proves necessary or to be in the client’s best interest, we have the resources, including three partners whose exclusive focus is bankruptcy litigation, to litigate and win. We have successfully litigated numerous issues impacting the restructuring process and have a proven track record of defending the company’s business judgment in restructuring.
With a deep focus on corporate governance as well as the practical business pressures our company-side clients face, including the demands of critical customers, employees and vendor relationships affecting a distressed company, Kramer Levin has facilitated financial and operational restructurings for debtors and secured timely confirmation of consensual and contested plans of reorganization in Chapter 11 cases in a broad range of industries, including:
- Energy
- Shipping
- Financial services
- Manufacturing
- Health care
- Real estate
- Retail
Drawing on our firm’s wide array of experience, we employ an interdisciplinary approach to help companies such as Genco Shipping & Trading Ltd. — a particularly complex Chapter 11 case involving $1.4 billion in debt, 57 affiliates, 25 sophisticated financial investors and a valuation battle — navigate issues such as financial debt, trade agreements, pension and union obligations, tax strategy, and employment arrangements.
In France, Kramer Levin represents clients in financial restructurings that proceed under the aegis of an ad hoc agent or conciliators as well as those involving a procedure of safeguard or judicial reorganization. Throughout the process, we help debtors balance conflicting interests with their creditors in order to achieve an efficient return to normal operations.
