Things That Caught Our Attention in the Waning Weeks of '16

It's easy for small matters to get lost in translation over the holidays and so we wanted to highlight a few developments that may have flown under the radar.

American Apparel

The company is looking to hire FTI Consulting to provide supplementary services to its current financial advisor, Berkeley Research Group. FTI will be paid $100k to prepare the Schedules and Statement of Financial Affairs and $300k for "other services" given institutional knowledge gained from the original Chapter 11 filing (note: this is a Chapter 22). Sadly, FTI had to waive its $2mm+ claim stemming from the original filing to secure this minor mandate. Ouch.

Choxi.com

The company and the official committee of unsecured creditors have submitted an application for CBIZ to serve as financial advisor to both concurrently. We've been around the business for a while but cannot think of any prior instances when the same financial advisor sat on both sides of the table. What are other instances of this, if any?

France

Just when the unintentional comedy that is France couldn't get any funnier, the country instituted a law codifying a right to disconnect, applicable to all companies with 50 or more employees. That's right: 35 hour work weeks, 14 months a year of vacation, and now the right not to be bothered by a partner at 7 pm with a request for a memo due by 9 am even though he won't look at it until 12 pm...9 days later. The Paris office of a lot of law firms just got much more interesting.