ABI's regional educational programs and conferences are probably, along with the ABI Journal, our most widely recognized and utilized membership service. But it wasn't always the case.

Once upon a time, ABI only had its Annual Meeting in the spring and the so-called Mid-Winter Conference in December as a way to deliver continuing legal education. At the outset, both of these events were held in Washington, D.C.¹ The result was that many ABI members couldn't or didn't take advantage of these meetings and the corresponding educational/networking opportunities. Something was missing, and we set out to correct it.

ABI has always prided itself as a membership services-driven organization. In the late 1980s, ABI leadership made a strategic decision to bring additional educational programs to the membership. Other entities were already providing insolvency education in the marketplace, so we determined that ABI needed to serve markets where we had members, but which were underserved by existing programs. Accordingly, we eschewed venues like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles for new ABI programs. Most ABI members also belonged to other national, regional or local groups that offered programming. As a relatively new player, we did not want to compete with other established organizations. So ABI tried other approaches. We sought out cosponsors in an effort to partner with an existing constituency rather than trying to create demand from scratch. We identified areas that were not already saturated with insolvency programming and created programs in those areas. We tried to combine the highest quality speakers with innovative and interesting formats to provide a different experience than the ones available from other sources. ABI leadership also thought that day-long education programs without significant social, recreational and networking opportunities would be less attractive to the membership.

An early illustration of this new ABI model was the Northwest Bankruptcy Conference, created in 1987 as a joint venture with the Bankruptcy Section of the Idaho Bar Associatoin, the Federal Bar Association Bankruptcy Section of Eastern Washington and the Montana Bankruptcy Law Section. The event was held in the fall at the beautiful Coeur d'Alene Resort on the lake of the same name in north Idaho. The program featured national speakers such as David Lander, Sally Neely and Judge Lloyd King, along with judges and practitioners from the region. Local program coordinators such as Ford Elsaesser (a future ABI president) and Celeste Miller, the local U.S. Attorney, were instrumental in organizing the program. I had a ring-side seat as chairman of ABI's Programs and Seminars Committee. These programs were inexpensive and also provided plenty of free time for boat cruises, golf outings and other events for socializing and networking. It was also a way for ABI members to do more than merely attend a good seminar: They had a sense of "belonging" to an organization that would meet their needs and goals in developing their practice.

Other experiments in regional programs soon followed. In 1992, we created the Great Plains Bankruptcy Conference, so named because it was headed by a group of ABI members from Iowa, including the clerk of court and future ABI Director, Barbara Everly. Barb was very experienced in creating successful programs, having done a long-standing program in the Northern District of Iowa. Some of the top practitioners from the entire nation traveled to Cedar Rapids each year for her national program. The ABI's Great Plains program was held in Las Vegas for two years, then moved to San Francisco for a year. While the program eventually wound down, its most significant contribution—interactive workshops that repeated in a small group format—would remain ABI's template for regional program success.

The next year, 1993, ABI created a new regional conference that is still thriving today, the Southwest Bankruptcy Conference. It was originally held in Santa Fe, N.M., in the early fall, when Texas practitioners in particular looked to escape the oppressive heat. Dallas members such as Paul Geilich were instrumental in the launch and success of these programs. The conference moved to Las Vegas in 2000, where it has enjoyed huge crowds; this year, more than 500 attended the program at the spectacular new Wynn Resort.

In 1994, ABI created two new regional conferences that to this day attract a large and devoted following of members: the Northeast Bankruptcy Conference and the Central States Bankruptcy Workshop. The Northeast was first held in the seaside resort of Ogonquit, Maine, and was attended by approximately 200 members from throughout New England. ABI leaders such as Joe Bodoff from Boston and Judge Jim Goodman from Maine gave generously of their time to make these early programs a success. The workshop format was a huge hit and was replicated in venues all over the region, from Mt. Washington to Stowe, Vt., Cape Cod and Newport. Indeed, we have outgrown most of the conference facilities in the region; members are known to try to sign up for next year's hotel as soon as they get home from the program. This summer conference evolved into the social event of the season for families too, as they enjoyed bike outings, sailing trips, nature hikes and lobster feasts while members fulfilled their CLE needs. Part of the success of this program is the fact that nearly everyone from the region can drive to the program.

The Central States program too has grown into the "must attend" program of the early summer. It began as the successor to the Great Plains Conference and has grown to some 400 annual attendees. It is unique among the ABI regionals in that it is the only program never to move the venue. The beautiful and functional Grand Traverse Resort on Lake Michigan has been its home for 13 years. Future ABI President Keith Shapiro was among those who helped nurture this conference in its early years.

In 1996, ABI built two new programs that have enjoyed a loyal and growing following. The Southeast Bankruptcy Workshop started at Hilton Head Island, S.C., and has moved to resorts from Kiawah Island, S.C., to Amelia Island, Fla. Future ABI Director (and Vice President-Education) Judy Thompson helped launch this program from her law firm in Charlotte, N.C. Families with small children are another fixture at this summertime regional. Also in 1996, we created the Rocky Mountain Bankruptcy Conference in Denver. Current ABI Director Jim Markus and now-Judge Beth Brown were instrumental in launching this successful program.

Other regional programs have made irregular appearances in our calendar of CLE events. Members in Hawaii urged us to bring national programs to them, so we created events on both Maui and Kauai, featuring national and local speakers, in the same workshop format. These programs were very popular—especially for those who were lucky enough to make the trip!

Recently, ABI added the Mid-Atlantic program, which has been presented on Maryland's Eastern Shore for two years, and a multi-year partnership with Georgetown University Law Center for our annual Views from the Bench conference. The latter is unique in providing an entirely judicial faculty with a national perspective on the leading issues of the day.

As the programs have grown in number, popularity and diversity, they have also become a critical component of ABI's financial success. In 1995, regional seminars made up about 17 percent of ABI revenue; last year they contributed 37 percent of its income—the largest single revenue line in our budget. They are also a key source of new members each year, as members join ABI when they register for the conference.

All of the regional programs provide extensive opportunities for ABI members to get a significant educational and networking opportunity within their own region, at a lower cost and in a more convenient way than traveling across the country to an ABI annual conference. These programs are sponsored, run and presented substantially by members within the region, yet also have access to the national network of speakers that comprise the leadership of ABI. As one who's been a part of this effort over the years, I have great pride in how our regional conferences and seminars have served ABI members. And as with much of ABI, I predict the best is still to come. Footnotes 1 The winter meeting moved to the west in 1990, with a program held in downtown Los Angeles. Since then, the renamed Winter Leadership Conference has been a fixture of the CLE calendar during the first weekend of December, in either Palm Springs or the Arizona desert resorts.

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Footnotes

1. The winter meeting moved to the west in 1990, with a program held in downtown Los Angeles. Since then, the renamed Winter Leadership Conference has been a fixture of the CLE calendar during the first weekend of December, in either Palm Springs or the Arizona desert resorts.

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The ABI Law Review and Moot Court Competition

Written by:
Prof. RobertM. Zinman
St. John's University School of Law; Jamaica, N.Y.
[email protected]

A portion of the ABI Executive Committee meeting in late 1991 was reserved for a free-flowing discussion of new initiatives to consider in the years ahead. I suggested we start a scholarly journal. Senior members of the committee said that the idea had been floated before but we had found it difficult to get a law school to participate. I said, "have I got the students for you!"

Indeed, I had been blessed with a group of brilliant students who were not only excited about bankruptcy but who literally demanded more bankruptcy activities in which they could participate. A year before, they started the St. John's Bankruptcy Law Society, the inaugural meeting of which, on April 16, 1991, featured Chief Judge Conrad B. Duberstein (Bankr. E.D.N.Y.), whose personal dynamism and enthusiasm infected the 70 students in attendance. The Executive Committee authorized me to speak to Dean Rudolph C. Hasl about enlisting St. John's support. Dean Hasl was enthusiastic. We had some conference calls with ABI Executive Director Sam Gerdano and others, which resulted in a meeting at the Annual Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C. in May 1992.

Flying to the meeting from St. John's was Dean Hasl; Gerard Luckman, who would become the first Editor-in-Chief of the ABI Law Review; John McNicholas, president of the St. John's Bankruptcy Law Society and future supervisory editor of the Law Review; and Stephen Bordanaro and Laurence Goldstein, both future supervisory editors. The American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review was born.

It was not until late June or early July 1992 that the advisory board was appointed, the theme of the issue selected and the editors named. With finals and the summer break facing them, the editors had to organize a staff, outfit an office, obtain the articles from the authors and edit them, and have a photo-ready copy¹ at the printer by October, the drop-dead date set by the printer for distribution of the printed issue by the Annual Meeting in 1993.

No amount of praise would be too much to describe the effort of the students. Jerry Luckman and his managing and associate managing editors, Lori Weber and Richard Viola (both of whom switched to the ABI Law Review from the St. John's Law Review), lived in the ABI Law Review office day and night. I recall one incident about 3:00 a.m. just before the deadline, when I had to interpose my body between the students working in the office and the guards attempting to evict them, an altercation much to the consternation of the St. John's administration. In the introduction to the first issue, I said of the students, with deep sincerity, that "[t]heir achievement defines the meaning of commitment, and is testimony to the heights to which the human spirit can soar."

Thanks to the students' efforts, the first issue—on single-asset bankruptcies—was an enormous success. While the issue was at the printer, a mere listing of the table of contents in the ABI Journal sent taxicabs to the campus (no e-mail then) from major firms to pick up printouts of particular articles. Former ABI President Ford Elsaesser, seeing the first advance copy of the printed issue at an Executive Committee meeting, took it with him to use in connection with his Ninth Circuit argument the next week in Bonner Mall.² Demand for the printed copies became so great that we had to go to a second printing! A few years later the American Bar Association printed an updated version as a hard cover book. Today, the ABI Law Review is widely regarded as the most influential and finest scholarly bankruptcy publication in the world.

Assuming there is such a word, my students could only be described as "bankrophiles." Home from the meeting in Washington, D.C., creating the ABI Law Review, they met one night after class at the bar of the Sly Fox Restaurant on Union Turnpike, this time with John and Christine Zukowski, the leaders of the St. John's Moot Court Honor Society, and decided that we should run a national moot court competition in bankruptcy and that it should be named after our great and beloved alumnus and former ABI Director, Chief Judge Conrad B. Duberstein. I contacted Sam Gerdano and suggested that such a competition might be another area for partnership between St. John's and the ABI. He agreed. The Executive Committee went along, and the Chief Judge Conrad B. Duberstein National Bankruptcy Moot Court Competition was born.

John McNicholas, representing the bankruptcy side, and the Zukowskis, representing the moot court, without any professional assistance, negotiated a contract with the Marriott Financial Center in New York for arguments and the awards banquet, and handled the administration, including arranging for preliminary-round judges and bailiffs. Sam Gerdano prepared the brochures for the schools and the dinner, and obtained the final-round judges. Judge Duberstein got us the Second Circuit Ceremonial Courtroom for the final round. Students from my bankruptcy class prepared the fact pattern, based on the single-asset issues featured in the ABI Law Review's first issue—classification and new value. The Bankruptcy Law Society prepared the Bench Memo.3

Eight teams from around the country competed in the first competition, which was won by New York University School of Law, and approximately 150 people attended the awards banquet. In March 2006, 54 teams participated in the 14th Annual Duberstein Competition and 850 people attended the awards banquet, which has become the bankruptcy event of the year in New York. Next year, the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges will hold its Board of Governors meeting in conjunction with the competition, and these members will judge the competition. The success of the Duberstein Competition gave rise to the creation of the graduate business school competition, named after ABI Past President and Chair Bettina Whyte.

As a result of these initiatives, ABI has become the leading institution dedicated to developing the careers of the future leaders of the restructuring practice.

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Footnotes

1 This was a major innovation. The printer wanted the copy by August, which was impossible. To buy two more months, the students agreed to send the material to the printer ready for printing (they would not even receive galleys or page proofs for review). Print programs were scarce, and the one we purchased failed to do the job. So the students devised their own program in WordPerfect. Photo-ready copy was unheard of for law reviews at the time. It has now become de rigueur.

2 Bonner Mall Partnership v. U.S. Bancorp Mortgage Co. (In re Bonner Mall Partnership), 2 F.3d 899 (9th Cir. 1993). The Ninth Circuit agreed with Ford that new value survived the adoption of the Bankruptcy Code. The case was settled after the Supreme Court granted certiorari (510 U.S. 1039 (1994)) but before oral argument.

3 Today, bankruptcy LL.M. students prepare the fact pattern, and the ABI Law Review staff does the bench memo.

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Professional Fee Study Update II

Written by:
Chip Bowles
Greenebaum Doll & McDonald PLLC; Louisville, Ky.
[email protected]

Prof. Stephen Lubben
Seton Hall Law School; Newark, N.J.
[email protected]

As noted in the Endowment News column of the May 2006 issue ("study history") of the ABI Journal,¹ ABI's study of professional fees in chapter 11 cases is one of the largest and most important research projects sponsored by ABI in its history, and ABI's membership will receive updates on the fee study's progress. This report is the mid-year update on the progress of this research initiative.

Overview of the Fee Study

As discussed in the study history article, one of the most important features of the fee study is the large number of cases and documents being reviewed to create the database to be used by the fee study's reporter, Prof. Stephen Lubben, in developing the empirical report that will comprise the core of the fee study. The fee study's raw data consists of three rounds of pleadings related to professional fees in the 1,028 cases being studied. These documents are being obtained by members of the fee study's Practitioners Advisory Panel (PAP)² at no cost to the fee study or ABI, and forwarded these pleadings to Prof. Lubben for review and data entry.³ This has involved several thousand documents being downloaded from Pacer,copied onto CD and forwarded to Prof. Lubben.

Current Status of the Fee Study

At the present time, the first and largest round of documents have been forwarded to Prof. Lubben, and data entry will be completed by early September. Data entry for the second round of documents is more than 50 percent complete. This is slightly behind the projected schedule due to problems with obtaining documents from various districts. Nevertheless, as the students who are doing data entry for the fee study become more experienced with data entry, Prof. Lubben believes that the second round of data entry will be completed in the very near future. The only exception will be the second-round data entry for the pleadings of the "big case" sample, which will undoubtedly remain a work in progress until late fall of 2006 due to the sheer volume of documents to be gathered.⁴

Beginning in October 2006, Prof. Lubben will forward a third round of document requests to the PAP. It is expected that this round will complete the document-collection process for the fee study, except for some of the largest or longest lasting cases in the sample. Prof. Lubben's original and continued goal is to complete data entry by early 2007 and move the project in a phase of error correction and preliminary analysis. We continue to expect that he will be able to present a descriptive report of the database at the upcoming 2007 Annual Spring Meeting, assuming document collection and data entry continues to go well.

Summary

The fee study would like to welcome ABI President-Elect Reggie Jackson (Vorys, Sater, Seymour & Pease; Columbus, Ohio) to the steering committee and Lisa Laukitis (Kirkland & Ellis LLP; New York) to the PAP. Laukitis will oversee the gathering of documents for the "big case" sample that are being gathered by Kirkland & Ellis for the fee study.

As discussed in the study history, the steering committee, PAP and other supporters of the fee study are still working diligently with Prof. Lubben to complete the fee study. The study is within its timeline, and its data-gathering phase is almost completed.

The authors and ABI Executive Director Sam Gerdano will continue to provide updates on the fee study's progress in this column and at ABI's Annual Spring Meeting.

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Footnotes

1 25 ABI Journal 106 (May, 2006). The fee study is overseen by the Fee Study Steering Committee, comprised of Judge Greg Zive, Hon. Steven Rhodes, Michael P. Richman, John Penn, Deirdre Martini, Bettina Whyte, Reginald Jackson, Sam Gerdano and Chip Bowles.

2 The PAP is chaired by Chip Bowles and consists of Geoffrey Berman, Joseph Bodoff, Rudy Cerone, Terri Gardner, Laura Davis Jones, Melissa Kibler Knoll, Lisa G. Laukitis, James T. Markus, Richard Meth, Hon. Neil Olack, Patricia Redmond, Thomas Salerno, James Sprayregen, James Sweet, Al Togut, Bruce White and Mark Williams.

3 See Id. at Section III for a further description of the data-gathering process.

4 The Big Case Sample of cases is a review of professional fees in 80 large chapter 11 cases that supplement to the random chapter 11 cases in the Fee Study. The pleadings in the Big Case Sample are being gathered by Kirkland & Ellis LLP.