Representing Insurers in Bankruptcies
The bankruptcy lawyers in Crowell & Moring's Insurance and Reinsurance Group represent insurance company clients on a range of issues that result from doing business with troubled companies, and we have litigated bankruptcy-related matters for our insurer clients in cases in state and federal trial courts and appellate courts. Our attorneys' cross-expertise in bankruptcy and insurance law has resulted in us taking leading roles on behalf of insurers in some of the nation's most prominent bankruptcies involving policyholders with asbestos, silica, environmental, other mass tort, and products-related liabilities. We represent a large number of domestic and foreign insurers, frequently taking the leading role on behalf of the group of insurers involved in the bankruptcy case.
Bankruptcy litigation tends to be unusually fast-paced, requiring that motions, oppositions, briefs, and objections be filed on tight time frames. Discovery is frequently expedited as well. Our Bankruptcy Team's deep experience in policyholder bankruptcies allows us to present our insurer clients' views effectively to bankruptcy courts even where the time for discovery, research, and writing might seem inadequate to others. And although the ability to brief cutting-edge issues is critical in these cases, so too is the ability to conduct the trial of confirmation hearings and other contested matters. We had major roles on behalf of our insurer clients in the trials of the Combustion Engineering, Federal-Mogul, and W.R. Grace confirmation hearings, and in 2009 we conducted two trials in Lloyd E. Mitchell. In addition to the list of recent representative matters we have handled, specific examples of the type of work we do for our clients in these cases include:
- Obtain modifications to a debtor's bankruptcy plan to preserve the contribution rights of our insurance company clients against other insurers;
- Obtain injunctive protection against future direct action claims brought by individual asbestos claimants against a debtor;
- Overturn on appeal a portion of a bankruptcy court's ruling disallowing our client's proof of claim;
- Defeat motions by asbestos claimants in two separate cases seeking to lift the automatic stay in order to prosecute their claims against the debtor in the tort system;
- Defeat a policyholder's motion for summary judgment seeking to bar our insurer client, on alleged lack of standing grounds, from objecting to a plan of reorganization or conducting discovery in support of our objections;
- Move for the appointment of a Chapter 11 trustee to take control of a debtor away from its current management;
- File a Chapter 11 plan of liquidation on behalf of our client and another insurer which would protect our client's rights under their insurance policies and determine how the debtor's estate would be distributed following plan confirmation;
- Obtain the right to arbitrate our insurer client's indemnification claims against a debtor, and then conduct and win a multi-day arbitration hearing awarding our client most of the amount claimed; and
- Challenge bankruptcy plan provisions that would have forced our insurer client to pay the full amount of an appeal bond while only recovering pennies on the dollar from the debtor.
Click this link for a "History of Asbestos Bankruptcies", including regularly updated charts listing all asbestos bankruptcy cases both chronologically and alphabetically and providing, for each case, the status of the proceedings and citations to all published decisions in each case.
For more information on Crowell & Moring's Representation of Insurers in Bankruptcies Practice, please contact Mark D. Plevin, who heads this practice, or Leslie A. Davis or Cynthia Kendrick in Washington, DC at (202) 624-2500.