Creditors of 4E Brands say findings of a survey they commissioned support their case for Judge Marvin Isgur of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston to recuse himself from weighing in on a dispute over legal fees the maker of hand sanitizer paid its law firm, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The creditors are seeking the return to 4E Brands of fees it paid to the Jackson Walker law firm. The creditors say Isgur shouldn’t rule on their request because of his friendship and professional relationship of more than two decades with David R. Jones, a former bankruptcy judge who had been handling the company’s chapter 11 case. Results of the survey were made public late Wednesday after the creditors presented them in a hearing a day earlier before Chief Bankruptcy Judge Eduardo Rodriguez of the Southern District of Texas. At the hearing, Mark P. Jones, a public opinion survey analyst at Rice University, testified he provided 150 adults randomly selected across the Southern District of Texas with basic facts about the circumstances of the fee dispute without naming its parties, and then asked if a judge in the situation could be impartial. Roughly 80% of respondents said it was unlikely a judge could be impartial in the fee matter, said Jones, who isn’t related to the former judge. “They don’t know [Judge Isgur] as a person. Just looking at the objective facts in the case, these objective observers say this appears to be a case where Judge Isgur would not be able to be impartial,” said Jones. San Antonio-based 4E Brands filed for chapter 11 protection in February 2022, following the fallout from a recall of and lawsuits over its methanol-contaminated hand sanitizers.
