I Want to Use My Licensed Intellectual Property in My Company’s Chapter 11 Case by Assuming My Already Existing License, but My Lawyer Tells Me We Are in the Wrong State to Do It. Really?
April 11, 2016
Authored by: Michelle Masoner and Mark Stingley
Editor’s Note: Our good colleagues at Willamette Management Associates were kind enough to feature a Bryan Cave Article in its Spring 2016 issue of Insights. If you are a bankruptcy attorney, then no doubt at some point you have had to deal with the mind-numbing exercise of determining when IP contracts or licenses (or government contracts, remember West Electronics, folks?) can be assumed, or assumed and assigned, or neither. This analysis can, in some circuits, result in a potentially huge loss of value to debtors and creditors, a la Sunterra. Your editorial team at the Bankruptcy Cave is annoyed that this problem, and this circuit split, has existed for over 30 years; but we are relieved to have an up-to-date Bryan Cave article on this. The article also includes a discussion of how the ABI Commission is planning to solve this problem. The Insights article by can be found by clicking