Stephanie M. Rippee, current Board member and former Product Liability Committee Chair, and H. Lanier Brown II, members at Watkins & Eager, PLLC, obtained a jury verdict in Sumter County, Alabama on March 20, 2019 in a fraudulent conveyance action.
Ms. Rippee, Mr. Brown, and their partner Jim F. Spencer, Jr. represented a Chapter 7 bankruptcy trustee who sought to set aside the debtor’s conveyance of more than $2 million dollars in real estate to its sister company. Faced with the threat of numerous large judgments from creditors, the debtor, a real estate investment company, transferred by quit claim deed a significant amount of its real estate holdings to a sister company. The debtor claimed that the transferee company was not, in fact, a related company and that the transfer of property was either late obtained collateral or payment to satisfy an antecedent debt that the debtor owed the transferee company. The jury found that the companies were insiders to each other and that the transfers were fraudulent conveyances. The jury entered a verdict ordering that the quitclaim deeds be set aside and that title to the properties re-vested in the debtor to be liquidated for the benefit of its creditors.