2026 Annual Seminar
March 13-15, 2026
We are looking forward to the Financial Lawyers Conference’s next Annual Seminar, to be held on March 13-15, 2026 at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa. This year’s Seminar will be led by Professor Vincent Buccola of the University of Chicago Law School.
The 2026 Seminar will address the following important bankruptcy law topics (some ripe, some budding) that go to the heart of what modern restructuring practice should or could look like:
1. Making Sense of Liability Management Transactions. If there’s a single mega trend in the restructuring world, it’s the move, over the last 10 or so years, toward increasing reliance on out-of-court recapitalizations, and especially on out-of-court deals that involve highly coercive offers (in a game theoretic sense of the word). Our aims will be twofold: first, to define and explain the change; and second, to consider the legality of common approaches, by attending especially to a theoretically fraught relationship between debt contract language and background legal principles that apply to debtor-creditor relations generally.
2. Non-Pro Rata Transactions in Bankruptcy. The economic forces that have given us liability management have also led, in cases that make their way to bankruptcy, to Chapter 11 processes that embed some but not all of the same coercive elements. In particular, the non-pro rata economics so familiar to LMT have found their way into Chapter 11 via DIP financing agreements and plan contemplated capital raises. We will consider how bankruptcy’s distinctive governance principles bear on the permissibility of non-pro rata transactions effected in court and what to think of resulting forum shopping if so.
3. Revisiting sub rosa plans. In its recent Boy Scouts decision, the Third Circuit embraced an understanding of 11 U.S.C. s 363(m) that could be used to sidestep the Code’s plan confirmation rules in a variety of contexts. We will weigh the practical as well as doctrinal limits to implementing broad-based restructuring deals through a 363 sale order and use Boy Scouts as a springboard to consider more generally the longstanding, uncomfortable relationship between the law of estate management and of plan confirmation.
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In order to accommodate our contractual obligations with the hotel, registration will close on January 23, 2026.
