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Houston has emerged as a favored destination for companies seeking chapter 11 protection, the Financial Times reported. Proponents argue that the system has fostered a group of expert jurists to sort out complicated corporate structures and messy claimant fights. Some scholars label it as “forum shopping.” Now, legislators pushing bills to halt the practice. Houston last year received a third of U.S. bankruptcy filings where the debtor’s liabilities were greater than $500m, matching the long-established court venue of Wilmington, Delaware, according to data compiled by the Financial Times from BankruptcyData.com. The largest city in Texas in 2020 handled 41 cases, more than any other venue in America, including such major cases as JC Penney, Neiman Marcus and Chesapeake Energy. Other unexpected court venues have also attracted cases: Richmond, Virginia, has become a hub for retail bankruptcies including Toys “R” Us and J Crew. An affiliate of Johnson & Johnson that makes talc products and faces product liability claims late last year chose the Western District of North Carolina, where five such other “mass tort” cases were pending. J&J’s headquarters are in New Jersey. The North Carolina judge who first took the Johnson & Johnson talc case transferred it to New Jersey. The Virginia court where only two judges heard big cases recently began to randomize assignments among eight judges. The Southern District of New York, where Purdue Pharma automatically got Judge Robert Drain in Westchester county, has just agreed to randomise selection across all nine of its bankruptcy judges. Before the gravitation to Houston, so-called “mega bankruptcies” were concentrated in New York and Delaware. Those two locations emerged in the 1980s and 1990s not because of proximity to companies’ headquarters. Rather, a high concentration of lawyers there drew cases and then more judges. Jones, the bankruptcy judge in Houston, dismissed the idea that his courthouse had become a magnet for big cases because its judges favored debtors. In an interview with Financial Times, he said that he and fellow Houston-based bankruptcy judge Marvin Isgur had become popular in part because both were experts in finance and business, allowing them to manage disputes that featured complex balance sheet restructurings. Separately, the Houston court had made efforts to be efficient, including having court personnel available on nights and weekends.