The committee is proud to have organized and hosted another very successful Consumer Practice Extravaganza (CPEX) in partnership with ABI’s professional staff, Co-Chairs Jeffrey Fraser and Summer Shaw, and a robust planning committee. Committee leadership serving on the CPEX planning committee included Heather Giannino (Co-Chair), Jeffrey Fraser (Special Projects Leader), Karlene Archer (Education Director), Mike Miller (Communications Manager) and Kara Gendron (Membership Relations Director).

ABI’s CPEX, now in its third year, continues to be the premier educational event for consumer practitioners. CPEX 2023 offered more than 25 hours of live sessions featuring judges, insolvency professionals and consumer attorneys from across the country. The online conference took place October 30-November 10, 2023. Many members of our committee leadership spoke on various panels throughout the two-week-long event. The committee is honored to continue playing an active role in the planning and presentation of this innovative event.

Jeffrey Fraser and Ari D. Kunofsky are our Special Project Leaders. In addition to Jeffrey’s leadership in CPEX 2023, Jeff and Ari hosted a webinar on Dec. 18, 2023, titled, “Post-Petition Appreciation: When Things Go Up, Who Gets What?”

Over the past year, case law around privacy and data security has been evolving in crypto industry bankruptcies, as courts grapple with familiar issues in a new industry. Debtors, unsecured creditors’ committees and other proponents of greater privacy for creditors of crypto companies argue that greater precautions are required because crypto company creditors are more likely than creditors of other types of companies to be targeted by identity theft and scams. Crypto assets can be attractive to scammers and other bad actors due to the anonymity of cryptocurrency transactions and difficulty tracing crypto assets.

While the Bankruptcy Code generally favors transparency, the Code and courts impose limits to that transparency. For example, Rule 9037 of the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure requires any filing in a bankruptcy court to limit disclosure of personally identifiable information (PII) to the following: (1) the last four digits of a Social Security number or tax identification number; (2) birthdates only to the year; (3) limiting the names of minor children to their initials; and (4) financial account numbers to the last four digits.

Section 107(c) of the Bankruptcy Code provides that the court may protect information of individuals if “disclosure of such information would create undue risk of identity theft or other unlawful injury to the individual or the individual’s property.” Courts often cite § 107(c) to authorize the redaction, filing under seal or entry of a protective order to protect vulnerable populations (e.g., nursing home residents and sex abuse victims). Bankruptcy Rule 1007(j) also permits the court to direct the impounding of creditor lists, schedules of assets and liabilities, statements of financial affairs and other documents for cause. This article discusses three recent crypto industry cases where courts were tasked with applying bankruptcy law’s competing goals of transparency and protection of PII to the question of whether to redact creditor information.