Well thanks, news cycle.
In the middle of writing up a post about speculation on one of several potential deals that would send assets from BP to Apache, the two companies announced they’d in fact agreed to a transaction this afternoon.
DealBook, earlier today, outlined some roadblocks in a speculative post about an agreement between the two companies:
For a company in BP’s situation, selling assets is anything but simple. Because of both continuing concerns that BP might at some point seek bankruptcy protection, and because BP’s creditors could later — even years later — seek to unwind an out-of-court asset sale as a “fraudulent conveyance,” any sale would come under heightened scrutiny, said Peter S. Kaufman, president and head of restructuring and distressed mergers and acquisitions at the Gordian Group, a New York investment bank.
The DealBook post is on-point; the deal does seem riddled with complexities unique to BP’s current situation.
This morning I read several other outlets cover the potential deal, and they all mentioned these potential complications in one way or another. But here’s the observation that fueled the post I was writing up: None of the coverage I read offered any input from actual bankruptcy attorneys on these unique complexities.
I’m not quite sure if this was just incomplete reporting or if, for one reason or another, news outlets couldn’t find a single attorney to go on record with remarks about the matter. I understand that law firms routinely remain silent on these issues, lest an attorney poison a potential relationship between the firm and BP with some off-the-wall, on-the-record remark. But deciding which breaking-news matters to talk about and which ones to stay away from is a balancing act, not a steadfast rule — and certainly not every single firm is staying away from public remarks about BP’s business.
I write this as someone who, in the recent past, worked as a press contact for a half-dozen law firms, including AmLaw 50 firms. It just doesn’t seem realistic that every single working corporate bankruptcy attorney with a newsworthy profile is mum on a corporate bankruptcy matter that, from what I can see, is more or less unprecedented.
