Bankruptcy
Karen Cordry, Project Counsel
NAAG Projects
Bankruptcy
Karen Cordry, Project Counsel
NAAG’s Bankruptcy Project, headed by Bankruptcy Counsel Karen Cordry, works with Offices of Attorneys General on a daily basis to provide assistance and counseling on issues that arise in specific cases. In addition to this one-on-one assistance, NAAG’s Bankruptcy Counsel participates in numerous training sessions for state counsel. These sessions include a multi-day training program on bankruptcy law for government lawyers held in the fall of each year, in conjunction with the States’ Association of Bankruptcy Attorneys. Counsel is also available to provide a one-day training session in the office of any interested Attorney General. In addition, she also provides information about the impact of bankruptcy law on other NAAG project areas, such as environmental and consumer protection, as well as presenting speeches before other governmental groups that encounter bankruptcy issues in their substantive areas. This includes issues such as health care and charities regulation, workers’ compensation, public benefits, and many other areas. She is also in the process of updating an extensive manual she wrote on bankruptcy law as it relates to government issues. Counsel also has worked with numerous states on sovereign immunity issues in the bankruptcy context, has helped edit numerous briefs, written several articles on the topic, and is often asked to provide technical expertise on the issue before both governmental and private groups.
NAAG Bankruptcy Counsel also provides substantive assistance to Offices of Attorney General on important multi-state cases in drafting and litigation issues that arise in bankruptcy cases. In light of counsel’s location in Washington, D.C., she can readily arrange to appear for states in bankruptcy hearings in Delaware and New York, locales in which many of the major cases have been filed. This may range anywhere from providing editing assistance on briefs to actually taking the lead role in representing a group of states on common bankruptcy issues in specific cases. In one recent predatory lending case, for instance, she led the efforts of states in the bankruptcy court to determine their rights to proceed despite the bankruptcy, and to have the issues removed to the district court. Those determinations were crucial to the final successful resolution of the case with a settlement providing for payment of about $45 million dollars to consumers. She has also worked with consumer protection offices in numerous states to contest efforts by debtors to obtain exemptions from state regulation of their going-out-of-business sales. These efforts have been successful in eliminating the objectionable provisions in the orders and ensuring that consumers will be protected during those sales, as well as in convincing counsel for the debtors to take these issues into account to begin with in carrying out these sales during bankruptcy cases. Similarly she has worked with the states to resist the efforts of debtors to unduly expand a tax exemption provision in the Bankruptcy Code, thereby helping them to collect much-needed revenues. Counsel has publicized these state initiatives through a column that she writes twice a year for the American Bankruptcy Institute Journal on governmental affairs. NAAG’s Counsel also works with the Tobacco Project to provide assistance and counseling on bankruptcy issues that may arise with respect to the enforcement of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.
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