By John Beck and Jennifer Lee (Hogan Lovells)
A debtor can elect to either assume or reject an executory contract under section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code. Because the Bankruptcy Code does not define “executory”, courts have historically overwhelmingly applied the “Countryman” test – which asks whether the contract parties have remaining unperformed obligations such that the failure of either party to complete performance would constitute a material breach of the agreement – to determine if a contract is executory. In a recent decision, however, Judge Laura T. Swain, the district court judge presiding over the 2017 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act proceedings, declined to utilize the Countryman test and adopted the alternative “functional approach” to determine whether the agreements at issue were executory. The “functional approach” focuses on the post-petition benefit to the debtor from assumption or rejection of a contract instead of the pre-petition obligations under the contract. The decision is the latest among a string of recent cases that have relied on non-Countryman tests to determine whether a contract is executory, with the “functional approach” emerging as the prevailing alternative. Read the full article here.