Governance in Chapter 11 Reorganizations: Reducing Costs, Improving Results

Throughout the past two years, Trans World Airlines, Midway Airlines, and R.H. Macy Company, as well as over 46,000 other corporations, have filed petitions for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. Of the firms that have filed Chapter 11 reorganization petitions, over eighty percent will never reorganize successfully and will not avoid a subsequent conversion to a Chapter 7 liquidation proceeding. The effects of these “misfilings” are enormous. Most fundamentally, an attempted reorganization, when liquidation is the more efficient solution, can unnecessarily increase the overall costs of bankruptcy significantly