Ethics

Financial Advisors Track: Current Issues for Financial Advisors in Bankruptcy Cases This panel will discuss the various governance, operational and quasi-legal issues that financial advisors deal with on a day-to-day basis before, during and after the commencement of a chapter 11 case. Topics will include addressing management fraud, dealing with ERISA/labor/WARN Act/union issues, navigating corporate governance issues, Dodd-Frank compliance, and the state of the law on pursuit of accounting and securities fraud claims.

This panel will explore the struggles of being both civil and persuasive and how our actions affect the reputation of the legal profession in society. The panel will also provide an update on the status of the ABI Civility Task Force.

This panel will focus on the ethics of limiting the scope of employment as well as attorney's fees in Chapter 7 and how they get paid.

This panel of regional judges and ethics experts will weigh in with analysis and guidance on current, relevant ethics issues. Case examples “ripped from the headlines” will highlight this discussion on disclosures, litigation issues and conflicts

Featuring the Judges of the 18th Annual Rocky Mountain Bankruptcy Conference

This panel will focus on the irrational biases for decision-making in bankruptcy. The essence of bankruptcy is deciding how to divide the debtor's metaphorical shrinking economic pie among qualified creditors. At its optimum, bankruptcy decision-making is efficient and rational. However, at other times even the most skilled bankruptcy practitioners are stymied by the inability of bankruptcy participants to make seemingly rational business decisions. Why can't everyone be rational? Decision-making is not a rational process. Behavioral economic scholars such as Daniel Ariely and Daniel Kahneman explain that we all have psychological biases that interfere with our ability to make objectively rational decisions. Bankruptcy practitioners who understand these biases learn strategies to influence them and thus enhance optimal bankruptcy decisionmaking.