Business

Valuation plays a critical role in cross-border insolvency and litigation matters, yet it often arises late in proceedings, creating challenges for practitioners. This panel will provide a practical overview of common valuation and regulatory issues that arise across jurisdictions, highlight key valuation approaches, and share real-world examples to illustrate best practices for addressing valuation challenges in complex cross-border cases.

Liability management exercises (LMEs) have become a central feature of the restructuring landscape, offering companies flexible, out-of-court solutions to address balance-sheet stress. Yet as these transactions grow more sophisticated, they increasingly raise a fundamental question: Who determines enterprise value when the deal happens outside chapter 11? Without a court-supervised valuation process, value is shaped through negotiation leverage, capital structure design, cooperation agreements, and financial engineering tools such as uptiers, dropdowns and priming transactions. These techniques can optimize outcomes for participating creditors and companies, but they can also spark valuation disputes, litigation risk and longer-term stakeholder friction. This panel examines how valuation is constructed in out-of-court LMEs, and will provide a framework for evaluating whether an LME enhances enterprise value or merely redistributes it.Learning Objectives:Attendees will analyze how enterprise value is determined in liability management exercises conducted outside of Chapter 11, including the role of negotiation dynamics and capital structure design.Attendees will evaluate the impact of common LME techniques—such as uptiers, dropdowns, and priming transactions—on creditor recoveries and overall enterprise value.Attendees will assess the legal and practical risks associated with out-of-court valuation, including potential disputes, litigation exposure, and intercreditor conflicts

This panel will address merchant cash advance financing, its history, structure, enforcement and treatment in bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy cases.

This session will present a concise, market‑focused look at distress in agricultural real estate. The panelists will define the scope of the ag sector, outline current market conditions, and identify the major drivers and asset types experiencing pressure. The discussion will cover distress pathways, valuation challenges, and the legal and regulatory factors shaping outcomes. Attendees will also gain insights into the roles of lenders and institutions, investor strategies and opportunities, key risks, and what the near‑term outlook suggests for stakeholders across the ag real estate landscape.Learning Objectives:Attendees will learn to:Identify the major asset types, market drivers and distress pathways currently affecting agricultural real estate across different regions.Apply specialized valuation methodologies and assess legal and regulatory factors unique to distressed agricultural property transactions.Evaluate investor strategies, institutional lender roles, and risk factors in agricultural real estate restructurings and workouts.

This session will address common factors that can lead to testimony from damages and valuation experts being excluded, along with recent trends and notable court opinions. The panelists will start by covering the legal standards for the admission of expert testimony, including substantive expertise, relevance, reliability and adequate foundation. Next, we will describe common technical mistakes that have led to exclusion or other problems, such as applying a premise or standard of value not appropriate to the situation at hand (e.g., liquidation value when going-concern value is more appropriate, synergistic value when fair value is the legally required standard, current value when solvency must be evaluated as of a specific prior date), double-counting damages for lost profits and lost business value over the same period of time, offering a valuation based on information that would not have been known or knowable as of the effective date of the valuation, failing to track documents reviewed in accordance with applicable rules, and reliance on privileged materials not available to the opposing party. After covering legal and technical issues, the panelists will use case studies and panel discussion to summarize current trends in the admission or exclusion of expert testimony, including recent opinions in which a federal or state court excluded a financial expert or limited the scope of his or her testimony. Finally, alternative approaches will be presented that might have allowed the experts from our case studies to have offered testimony similar to what was excluded.Learning Objectives:Attendees will analyze the legal standards governing the admissibility of valuation and damages expert testimony, including relevance, reliability, and methodological rigor.Attendees will evaluate common pitfalls that lead to exclusion of expert testimony, including improper assumptions, double-counting of damages, reliance on hindsight, and use of privileged or inadmissible information.Attendees will assess best practices for strengthening expert valuation reports, including documentation, support for assumptions, and alignment with accepted valuation methodologies.

The U.K. Scheme of Arrangement and other international restructuring tools have attracted global attention for their flexibility and effectiveness. This panel will explore whether the U.S. should adopt a similar framework, and will analyze potential benefits, challenges and implications for debtors and creditors within the existing chapter 11 system.

In recent years, the life sciences sector has faced mounting pressures from capital market volatility, regulatory scrutiny and evolving patient data standards. With a noticeable uptick in financial distress and a decline in successful bankruptcy resolutions, stakeholders are grappling with existential questions about sustainability, compliance, and trust. Bringing together finance, legal, operational and regulatory perspectives, this session will provide attendees with practical insights into how companies can manage risk, preserve value and protect trust – even under duress.

This panel will examine key regulatory developments affecting the health care sector, including recent policy changes, enforcement trends, compliance challenges and stakeholder decision-making, as well as how shifting regulations are influencing restructuring strategies and creditor recoveries.