The recasting of insolvency law

Over the last decade corporate insolvency laws and processes have changed in two important ways. There has been a philosophical shift away from ex post responses to corporate crises and towards influencing the way that corporate actors manage the risks of insolvency ex ante. In addition, there has been a revision of insolvency roles so that participants in corporate and insolvency processes are increasingly encouraged to see corporate decline as a matter to be anticipated and prevented rather than responded to after the event. In this development turnaround specialists have gained a new prominence. These are changes that reflect broader social and governmental trends to audit performance more actively and to see issues in terms of needs to manage risks. Such developments are important for corporate and insolvency lawyers – they recast a host of issues within new framing assumptions and they force a re-thinking of corporate insolvency law's challenges and agendas.