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Kodak earlier this month filed a final tally of costs for its chapter 11 bankruptcy, as well as a motion asking the final closing of the case, the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle. That $245.2 million total is $2.1 million more than the $243.1 million worth of bills presented to the court in November 2013. Kodak semi-officially ended its bankruptcy in September 2013 when its reorganization plan took effect. That moment saw the company selling off its Personalized Imaging and Digital Imaging businesses to a British pension fund, cancel out all its existing stock, and issue new shares to an array of parties holding IOUs, from the financiers who helped pay for Kodak's bankruptcy to the legions of creditors left with unpaid bills when the company filed for protection. Since then, the Kodak General Unsecured Creditors Trust has been suing numerous firms that did business with Kodak before the bankruptcy, seeking to claw back some of the money Kodak spent in those pre-bankruptcy weeks to then divide it up among various unsecured creditors. The court also has continued to rule on cases where Kodak objected to some of the 7,000 claims and requests for payment that had been filed against it. And during all this time, Kodak has been paying out what it had been ordered to pay as part of its reorganization plan. According to the motion, Kodak has paid out some stock and stock warrants to holders of unsecured claims, and expects to do one final payout of yet more.

GT Advanced Technologies Inc., a parts supplier for Apple Inc., filed for bankruptcy, showing a partnership with the iPhone maker couldn’t assure success for its business of manufacturing lab-grown sapphire used to make mobile-device screens sturdier, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Apple last November signed a deal to make a prepayment of about $578 million to GT Advanced to build furnaces used to make synthetic sapphire. When Apple introduced new iPhones last month though, the smartphones didn’t include the material. The lack of sapphire in the new iPhones was a surprise to those who had tracked the partnership, and the development exposed that GT Advanced had become overly dependent on Apple, said Pierre Maccagno, an analyst with Dougherty & Co. GT Advanced listed assets of $1.5 billion and liabilities of $1.3 billion as of June 28, according to its chapter 11 filing.

Bankruptcy Judge Howard Tallmanhas dismissed the case of a Denver marijuana business owner, saying that although his activities are legal under Colorado law, he is violating the federal Controlled Substances Act, the Denver Post reported yesterday. The case is at least the second such one involving a marijuana business tossed out of bankruptcy court in Colorado. At least two others have been dismissed in California. Judge Tallman made a similar decision in a 2012 case involving Rent-Rite Super Kegs West Ltd, a company that operated a warehouse partially rented to a tenant cultivating marijuana. "Violations of federal law create significant impediments to the debtors' ability to seek relief from their debts under federal bankruptcy laws in a federal bankruptcy court," Tallman wrote in his decision.

MF Global's creditors, who have waited nearly three years to get paid, will have to wait a little longer after a bankruptcy judge yesterday held off approving its bid to repay them $295 million, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported yesterday. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn said that he was uncomfortable with one part of the proposal: MF Global's request to estimate certain unresolved claims at zero dollars. The judge said that he was "not happy" that he didn't have enough information on some of the claims.

Three-and-a-half years after Howrey LLP shut its doors, another 31 former partners of the bankrupt law firm have agreed to chip in money to pay back Howrey’s creditors, the Wall Street Journal reported today. In settlement papers filed in bankruptcy court on Friday, Howrey trustee Allan Diamond says that he’s reached deals to bring in close to $1.5 million from the batch of onetime equity partners. That’s on top of a nearly identical settlement reached in May with 60 ex-partners that raised $4.2 million for creditors. The contributions, ranging from $3,532 to $200,000, claw back 16 percent of what partners earned between April 2010 and Howrey’s dissolution a year later — a period during which Diamond argues Howrey was insolvent. (Subscription required.)
http://blogs.wsj.com/bankruptcy/2014/09/22/former-howrey-partners-contr…

For more on law firm bankruptcies and “unfinished business” claims, be sure to read “Is the Unfinished-Business Rule Finished? Recent Decisions Could Close the Book on Hourly Matters” in the September edition of the ABI Journal.
http://journal.abi.org/content/is-the-unfinished-business-rule-finished…

Four former Dewey & LeBoeuf executives filed new motions late last week asking the New York State Supreme Court to throw out charges of grand larceny and fraud linked to the firm’s 2012 collapse, claiming that Manhattan prosecutors failed to produce evidence of criminal intent and incorrectly instructed a grand jury about accounting rules the men are accused of abusing, the American Law Journal reported today. Dewey’s former chairman Steven Davis, former executive director Stephen DiCarmine, former chief financial officer Joel Sanders and former client relations manager Zachary Warren filed their motions on Friday following the Manhattan District Attorney’s response to their previous motions to dismiss the indictment. Lawyers for Davis, DiCarmine and Sanders wrote that “despite somewhere between one and two million emails and apparently almost 4,000 pages of grand jury testimony, the prosecutors and the grand jury have no direct evidence of these defendants’ larcenous intent.”

The administrator for the now-defunct Coudert Brothers LLP can’t seek fees earned from former partners who now work at other firms, a federal appeals court in New York held, Bloomberg News reported today. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit yesterday reversed a ruling by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon, who had found that “the uncompleted client matters were assets of Coudert, and as such recoverable by the bankruptcy estate.” The circuit court relied on a July 1 opinion from the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, which held that the profit on unfinished business can’t be considered the property of a firm that has filed for bankruptcy. That court made the ruling because it had surfaced in the bankruptcy of Thelen LLP as well as Coudert. The administrator, Development Specialists Inc., was seeking fees from firms including Dechert LLP, Morrison & Foerster LLP and K&L Gates LLP. The group of firms is represented by Miller & Wrubel PC.

A bankruptcy judge said yesterday that Jon S. Corzine and other former MF Global Holdings Ltd. executives and employees could tap more insurance money to pay for defense costs but called the decision a “stopgap”, as he decides whether they must continue seeking court permission to access the cash, the Wall Street Journal reported today. “I’m not using this as a way of avoiding the decision,” said Judge Martin Glenn of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. The judge set a “soft cap” of $55 million for the defense costs. The former executives have already tapped about $47.5 million of the insurance for their legal defense, including unpaid bills.

Diamond McCarthy is suing ex-partner Sheila Gowan, seeking some of the $1.4 million that is likely to be paid to her for work in the Dreier law firm bankruptcy, The Global Legal Post reported today. She is expected to receive $1.4 million for her work as a chapter 11 trustee in the Dreier bankruptcy. However, Diamond McCarthy claims that she should be bound by a partnership agreement regarding the fees. It alleges breach of the partnership agreement and of fiduciary duty, as well as making some equitable claims, seeking punitive damages and lawyer’s fees. Gowan, a non-equity partner who worked in the firm’s New York office until a year ago, claims that she did not sign the partnership agreement.

Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross yesterday cleared the way for creditors to vote on the chapter 11 plan that sets out the distribution scheme for cash and stock raised in the sale of failed hybrid auto maker Fisker Automotive Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported today. Judge Gross signed off on voting materials, allowing balloting to begin on the chapter 11 payout plan for the old Fisker, the remnant of the operating company that was sold for $149.2 million to China's Wanxiang Group. Fisker, its unsecured creditors and the company's secured lender, a company connected to Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li, settled their differences over dividing the sale proceeds in advance of yesterday’s hearing in bankruptcy court.