Bankruptcy Blogs

The Justice Department’s bankruptcy watchdog is shuffling its ranks for 2014.

Almost every year, changes are made to the set of rules that govern how bankruptcy cases are managed — the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure. The changes address issues identified by an Advisory Committee made up of federal judges, bankruptcy attorneys, and others.

After more than a year of cost-cutting and debt negotiations, Stockton, Calif., leaders can now focus their efforts on a March courtroom trial that could be the final hurdle to getting the 300,000-resident city out of bankruptcy. Read the Daily Bankruptcy Review story via The Wall Street Journal.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

JPMorgan Reaches Big Mortgage Accord: The New York bank agreed to a $13 billion settlement to resolve the government's longstanding issues with questionable mortgage practices. The Wall Street Journal said the "historic settlement," which ends multiple probes into mortgage bonds issued before the financial crisis, is the largest amount of fines and damages the government has secured from a company in a civil settlement. The New York Times notes that $4 billion...

A prominent lawyers group is defending the right of bankruptcy judges to have the final say in their courtrooms, a right upon which a 2011 Supreme Court ruling has cast doubt.

The American Bar Association, whose 400,000 members include many of the country’s lawyers and judges, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to narrowly interpret its prior ruling by confirming bankruptcy courts’ broad ability to enter final orders and judgments.