Despite its impact on families, on Main Street and on certain other pockets of the US economy, the worldwide pandemic has not driven a sustained wave of restructuring activity. The panelists will explain the reasons behind this phenomenon and provide some insights about the longer term impact of the pandemic, including sectors to watch.

Multiple recent transactions have utilized novel reads of credit documents to prime existing senior debt or otherwise advantage one creditor group over another despite similar positioning within companies’ pre-transaction capital structures. This panel will discuss the impact of such recent transactions as well as the opportunities and challenges faced by creditors and companies alike in this still-evolving environment.

The distressed investing world has never seen a year like 2020. The panelists will share their impressions and experiences on investing in the midst of the global pandemic, oil price wars, roaring capital markets, and the rise of the retail investor. As we turn the corner, we will discuss the potential opportunities and pitfalls for 2021 and beyond and the outlook for the distressed investing industry.

This panel will discuss the challenges and achievements of stakeholders, investors and advisors in the retail industry over this last year, how the COVID pandemic intensified and accelerated ongoing trends and led to some welcome and unwelcome surprises.

Weil restructuring partner David Griffiths will lead a discussion on the challenges of executing contentious cross-border chapter 11 cases during COVID. Drawing on the successful restructuring of Speedcast International, a global remote communications business serving 3,200 customers in  140 countries, the panel will address the strategic path taken by Speedcast in the face of an intractable dispute among its secured lenders that stalled its restructuring, the steps that ultimately ensured that the Company was able to successfully reorganize, and the hurdles it had to overcome to get there.

Co-Chair Alexander McHale interviews authors Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap about “most brutal corporate restructuring in Wall Street history” and their thoughts on distressed investing today. Conference attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Frumes' and Indap's book, “The Caesar's Palace Coup”.

From the book’s official description: “In the tradition of Barbarians at the Gate and The Big Short comes the riveting, multi-dimensional poker game between private equity firms and distressed debt hedge funds that played out from the Vegas Strip to Manhattan boardrooms to Chicago courthouses and even, for a moment, the halls of the United States Congress.

In The Caesars Palace Coup, financial journalists Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap illuminate the brutal tactics of distressed debt mavens―vultures, as they are condemned―in the sale and purchase of even the biggest companies in the world with billions of dollars hanging in the balance.”