Jared Ellias: "The Elevation of the Board is an Important Trend in the Bankruptcy Process"

In this episode, I talk with my colleague Jared Ellias, the Bion M. Gregory Chair in Business Law and the Faculty Director of the Center for Business Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. In 2020, he was honored by the American Bankruptcy Institute as one of the "40 Under 40 Leaders in Insolvency Practice." His research interests include corporate bankruptcy; corporate governance; empirical legal studies; financial markets and commercial law. In this podcast, we talk about his latest article “The Rise of Bankruptcy Directors” where he and his co-authors show that many distressed companies, especially those controlled by private equity sponsors, prepare for bankruptcy by appointing bankruptcy experts to their boards of directors and give them the power to make key bankruptcy decisions. These supposedly independent directors (who are usually appointed repeatedly) often seek to wrest control from creditors of self-dealing claims against shareholders. We also discuss bankruptcy in more general terms including topics at the intersection of corporate governance and bankruptcy. If you like this show, please consider subscribing, leaving a review or sharing this podcast on social media. You can find all the show notes on the website boardroom-governance.com and please feel free to subscribe to the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at evanepstein.substack.com