“As [energy company] Mirant’s Chapter 11 unfolds in North Texas, the region’s bankruptcy bar is keenly aware that the region is playing for high stakes. The area has been trying for years to bag a big-ticket bankruptcy. Its first catch was Mirant, the 10th-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. It’s been very, very good to Fort Worth.” Large-firm bankruptcies are enormously lucrative to lawyers, other professionals and support industries, but the competition for a business once dominated by Manhattan and Delaware puts pressure on judges to issue rulings pleasing to the managers and lawyers of debtor companies. “Judges who don’t deliver are dooming themselves and their local peers to backwater status: Let a big bankrupt company leave unhappy, and nobody else will come back.” In the 1980s, one-third of big bankruptcies were filed away from the bankrupt firm’s headquarters, an indicator of forum-shopping; since then the figure has risen to two-thirds (Margaret Newkirk, “Courts compete to bag big cases”, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 29).

Filed under: Atlanta, bankruptcy, Delaware