Episode Details

This is the official court audio of the hearing held April 2, and is docketed on the court's docket.

There have been some hearings in the Saks bankruptcy proceedings since the last Saks hearing posted to this podcast. The hearings concerned, for the most part, a dispute with a particular party as opposed to macro developments in the cases. The hearings were somewhat lengthy and broken up over a few recordings, and not available on the podcast but are available on the court's docket and the case administration site. https://cases.stretto.com/Saks/court-docket/ (Search the docket for the files named audio).

This latest hearing being streamed here was held on April 2, 2026 and concerns an emergency request to lift the automatic stay. The automatic stay is a protection that goes into effect by operation of law under section 362 of the Bankruptcy Code, when a bankruptcy petition is filed. In this case as it typical the Saks chapter 11 debtors are protected by the stay, not only from contractual obligations, but also from continuing to defend personal injury litigation arising from injuries sustained before Saks Global went into bankruptcy.

In this case it sounds like an individual plaintiff wanted to proceed with personal injury litigation in Massachusetts and sought bankruptcy court approval via counsel. The bankruptcy court was responsive, held a hearing, and continued the hearing to a final hearing on May 7. The court encouraged the parties to work things out, in other words to at least agree to a date the automatic stay will lift. This is after the judge suggested a 60 day time frame at the outset of the hearing.

The court noted that the court will not allow the stay to stop the case from going to trial indefinitely. I think it would be interesting for the lawyer who argued against the automatic stay being lifted to listen to what he is saying to the court, and ask himself why he would try to deprive a personal injury claimant of continuing litigation when it doesn't make a difference in terms of the future of Saks Global. Also the law is pretty clear, even with outlier cases like Purdue Pharma, which some people estimated pays just $40k for wrongful death claims - that personal injury claims can't be liquidated in bankruptcy court.

As the court noted, at some point bankruptcy courts allow personal injury claims to be liquidated, in other words to continue on their path to jury trial or other payout under applicable non bankruptcy law.