The debate on Jan. 29, at a Bloomberg event looking at the Final Report of the ABI Chapter 11 Reform Commission, centered not on whether to alter the Bankruptcy Code but on specific changes of everything from real estate lease rejection timelines to plan voting requirements, The Deal Pipeline reported on Friday. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz partner Harold S. Novikoff, one of the panelists in an opening discussion, said the Dec. 8 report was not a "teardown" of the Code. The event's moderator, Bill Rochelle of Bloomberg News, later called many of the changes "not radical." University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law professor Michelle M. Harner said that the special commission formed by the ABI for the report began its three-year process in January 2011 asking if the rules governing bankruptcy even needed updating. Part of the discussion dealt with the treatment of executory contracts and leases. A suggestion outlined in the commission's report was extending the period to reject real estate leases from the current seven months to a year. http://www.thedeal.com/content/restructuring/panelists-discuss-changes-… To view the recommendations of the Final Report of ABI’s Chapter 11 Reform Commission, please visit http://commission.abi.org.
