Receiver, special master, and liquidator appointments in federal court, and counsel to fiduciaries administering distressed and disputed estates.
A receivership is the one engagement a firm cannot pitch its way into. The court selects, the court supervises, and the court approves every dollar that leaves the estate. Our lawyers have been appointed receiver and special master by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and liquidator by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. We also serve as counsel to fiduciaries, including as counsel to the receiver in the Par Funding receivership and as counsel to a trustee administering a real estate developer’s estate. That work does not always begin with an appointment. We are often engaged before a trustee is confirmed, when the question is still who will administer the estate and on what terms.
The work is not litigation with a different title. It is taking over a business that has usually just collapsed, stabilizing it, finding assets that someone has reason to hide, running a claims process that has to withstand challenge, and litigating the priority questions that decide who gets paid and in what order.
Most people who deal with a receivership are not the receiver. They are investors with claims, borrowers and counterparties whose contracts are now assets of the estate, professionals whose fees are being examined, and defendants in the clawback suits a receiver brings. Having run these estates from the inside, we know how the claims process is actually administered and where a position is worth pressing.
We take those engagements, and we decline them where the receivership is one of ours.