Distressed Company Representation

When a company runs short of cash, the exposure “fingers pointed” can range from corporate risk to personal liability. Decisions taken months earlier in the ordinary course - a financing, an asset sale, a payment to an insider - may be read backward through the collapse and recast as breaches. The parties pressing those claims may be creditors committees, liquidating trustees and lenders, and they often come with the estate's resources behind them. Various stakes are in play at the same moment: the survival of the business, control of the process that will decide its future, and the personal exposure of the directors and officers who ran it. Frequently the carrier that should be funding the defense is contesting whether it owes one. Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors navigates these issues at each stage.

The Firm's clients are boards, officers, controlling shareholders, sponsors and the distressed companies themselves. They seek a range of goals: a defense that holds, coverage forced open, claims of their own pursued while there is still value to recover, and a process they are steering rather than reacting to. Brewer takes on the full campaign. It defends the people whose judgment is being reconstructed after the fact, in the Delaware Court of Chancery and in the federal and bankruptcy courts where these fights are decided. It prosecutes the affirmative claims a troubled enterprise still owns against lenders, counterparties and advisors, because recovery won in litigation is often the most durable asset left on the balance sheet. And it takes on carriers that deny coverage at the moment defense costs peak, because a defense no one will fund is not a defense.

A distressed matter is almost never only a legal problem. The numbers are contested, the facts are unsettled, and the company’s standing with lenders, customers and the market is being set in public while the case runs. Brewer addresses these issues from inside the Firm. Its Consulting Group examines solvency analyses, valuation assumptions and damages models as part of the trial team. Its communications professionals hold the line while the litigation is live. Nothing in the building competes with the case, because Brewer neither papers deals nor advises on them. These matters move in days. The Firm is already assembled when they do.