R. Scott Alsterda

Scott chairs the bankruptcy and creditors’ rights group. He has over 25 years of experience in this specialized area of law. His experience includes representation of institutional and individual clients in a wide array of insolvency, restructuring, workout and bankruptcy cases. His clients include secured lenders, landlords, vendors, buyers, insurance companies, municipalities, creditors’ committees, shareholders, investors, trustees and debtors. Coupled with Scott’s representation of a diverse client base he has been involved in cases in many different sectors of our economy including commercial lending, real estate, retailing, airlines, automotive, hotel, distribution, manufacturing, equipment financing and agribusiness. In the context of his background and experience, Scott concentrates his practice on the basic issues common to all entities namely counseling and litigating to enforce his clients’ contract rights, pursue their claims against other parties, defend attempts by other parties to recover claims against his clients and pursue his clients’ business interests and opportunities in financially troubled situations. In pursuit of these goals, Scott has had the opportunity to appear in many bankruptcy courts from Maine to Hawaii in the past several years.

Recent representative examples of Scott’s experiences in bankruptcy and creditors’ rights cases include the following:

• Represented a bank holding secured debt against a publishing company through an out of court workout, followed by an assignment for the benefit of creditors and a subsequent Chapter 7 case including the bank’s defense of a fraudulent transfer case instituted by the Chapter 7 trustee.
• Represented a national hotel chain which owns or manages various facilities in order to enforce the clients’ contractual rights and claims against the counterparties who have filed Chapter 7 or 11 bankruptcy cases.
• Represented a partnership that owned a large apartment complex in a Chapter 11 reorganization case that involved the resolution of complex financing and sale issues to allow the partnership to successfully emerge from Chapter 11.
• Represented a leading health care insurer in numerous Chapter 7 and 11 bankruptcy cases filed by its customers throughout the country. The scope of this representation included negotiations for the continuation of health care plans during the bankruptcy case and the successful defense of some very significant preference cases.
• Represented a private equity fund that owned the land and buildings leased to a manufacturer in the automotive industry as that company went through a Chapter 11 case and a sale of its assets to a new owner.