The ILA Technical Committee, in conjunction with the CLLS, has produced the attached briefing note that reminds practitioners and businesses of the flexibility of a UK administration to stabilise, protect, and, if necessary, restructure companies.

It is vitally important, as businesses across the UK battle the enormous challenges posed by the COVID 19 crisis, that we remember that England has some of the most flexible and adaptable corporate restructuring processes anywhere in the world. In the decade since the financial crisis, lawyers and their clients have become used to resorting to the administration procedure only when other efforts to restructure have failed.

There is a danger, therefore, that the narrative in the broadcast and press media, and among directors around the country, becomes that filing for administration inevitably means collapse and that, somehow, the US chapter 11 process is a better restructuring tool. Yet this fundamentally ignores the flexibility to mobilise administration to stabilise, protect, and, if necessary, restructure companies. The purpose of this brief note is to remind all, how administration can be used in this way.