Arizona State Approved Sessions

This panel will discuss how secured creditors can inadvertently find themselves junior in priority, diminishing the value of their loans, and how they can protect themselves.

Join Mr. Pauker as he shares his perspectives on the recent turmoil in the banking and financial services industry, including what lessons can be learned by comparing recent events to those surrounding the S&L crisis and the 2008 financial crisis.

This panel delves into everything you ever wanted to know about the intersection of construction law and bankruptcy.

This panel discusses cutting-edge issues involving the use of AI in law practice, and ethical questions and potential pitfalls surrounding its use by lawyers and legal professionals.

Metaverse business success can really only happen with significantly more technological adoption, so any valuation of an individual metaverse business is at some level an underwriting of the technological adoption. In what areas may the metaverse be cannibalistic? In what areas may it be accretive to existing platforms/channels? Is the metaverse likely to be principally a business or personal environment, or both? What are the avenues for investment in the metaverse and determining valuation? It has recently been predicted that the metaverse economy could, in the aggregate, “generate up to $5 trillion in impact by 2030 — equivalent to the size of the third-largest economy today, Japan." Much of that impact is seen in e-commerce by far, with other market impacts in virtual learning, advertising and gaming. But how are the various “things” in the metaverse going to be valued? If you don’t know, or don’t know what the metaverse is or encompasses, this panel is for you.

This panel will discuss situations in which valuation is particularly challenging based on the type of asset, the absence of market or comparable valuation data, limitations on available information for the valuation, and other constraints. We will cover the valuation of intellectual property assets, financial assets (including royalties and other revenue streams), digital and electronic assets (including virtual currency, software code, social media assets and platforms), and privately held equity interests, among other asset categories in different sectors, such as emerging restructuring sectors like life sciences. We will also discuss valuation contexts (transaction diligence and structuring, financing and M&A transaction consummation, and distressed situations and insolvency proceedings), focusing on both the practical challenges and evidentiary support for valuation determinations in those contexts. We also will provide examples of situations in which challenging valuations have served as keystones to transactional successes.

This panel will compare and contrast the SPAC craze of 2020-21 to see where we are now and what lies ahead.

For nearly 100 years, we have not experienced a shock to the economy where large numbers of industries exhibited disastrous declines in revenues resulting from a pandemic. Frankly, none of us were equipped with readily available valuation frameworks to handle such shocking changes in cash-flow projections, discount rates, the ‘appropriate’ use of comparable companies and the relevant transactions to be used in the M&A comparable method. This panel discussion will present the main valuation parameters that have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated legal and experts’ battles, mostly during and post-pandemic.

This session will discuss crypto asset and exchange valuation parameters and deal structures, and how investors and analysts alike were duped by FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, to invest in his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. SBF had painted himself as an industry saint, but he now acknowledges the firm's “massive failure of oversight of risk management.” The panelists will analyze 2022's largest crypto failures — FTX, BlockFi, Three Arrows Capital, Voyager Digital and Celsius Network — and will address their crypto asset valuation parameters, forensic data sources, trading models, likely stakeholder recoveries, failures of internal controls, current and likely future regulatory controls, and corporate integrity and governance protocols in order to understand how these virtual currencies rose and subsequently collapsed.