Bankruptcy & Restructuring
Bankruptcy practice is a chimaera: half litigation, half creative design and negotiation. A code-based practice area, supplemented by tax and corporate skills, it owes much of its outcome to the blessing of judges. But this is also where vast resources can go to waste in adversarial proceedings.
Restructuring a bankrupt estate or looming situation, on the other hand, is an appeal to ingenuity and imagination: to shape viable value from a clay consisting of insolvent material and immaterial assets, inspiring confidence sufficient to preserve jobs and relationships, and to prevent the destruction of trust and asset value.
The difference between liquidation value and restructuring value is the value of complexity: think crystalline snowflake vs. droplet of water; diamond vs. carbon.
A good bankruptcy lawyer resembles an intuitive auctioneer. But accomplished restructuring means to return to a bankrupt estate its “soul” as an emergence, a greater substance and consequence than adding up the tally of auction proceeds of individual assets. This “soul” disappears in the destruction of complexity.
Working with insolvent entities involves anything but trivial destruction. It is about providing creditors with “the vision thing,” showing that, why, and how liquidation is not the best possible outcome for their claim. If value is what someone is prepared to pay for something, the challenge of unlocking value is to convince many to leave the surly bounds of conventional imagination to achieve it.
Restructuring a bankrupt estate or looming situation, on the other hand, is an appeal to ingenuity and imagination: to shape viable value from a clay consisting of insolvent material and immaterial assets, inspiring confidence sufficient to preserve jobs and relationships, and to prevent the destruction of trust and asset value.
The difference between liquidation value and restructuring value is the value of complexity: think crystalline snowflake vs. droplet of water; diamond vs. carbon.
A good bankruptcy lawyer resembles an intuitive auctioneer. But accomplished restructuring means to return to a bankrupt estate its “soul” as an emergence, a greater substance and consequence than adding up the tally of auction proceeds of individual assets. This “soul” disappears in the destruction of complexity.
Working with insolvent entities involves anything but trivial destruction. It is about providing creditors with “the vision thing,” showing that, why, and how liquidation is not the best possible outcome for their claim. If value is what someone is prepared to pay for something, the challenge of unlocking value is to convince many to leave the surly bounds of conventional imagination to achieve it.
Litigation
If the prize in legislation goes to the Congressman or Senator that is most virtuoso on the keyboard of his chamber’s rules of procedure, the same is true in another branch of government. Litigation reminds me of a form of chess in which challenge and satisfaction increase with the hostility of the underlying facts. Trial and appellate litigation must have been the parts of creation where the Eleventh Commandment has been coined: “Thou shalt never say never.”
But like in tax work, what is most necessary to success is to take a birds-eye view of the situation and the entirety of its context, not merely a narrow one of substantive law or procedure. Because factors far outside of that can have vital influence on the final result, the lawyer must be above all result-oriented and withstand the temptation to win battles rather than the war.
In many ways, this combination of rule-based expertise and the ability to zoom in and out of a holistic picture is what makes litigation practice such a mentally rewarding exercise. It is also a very scalable skill, open to a solo practitioner as well as to a case team with dozens of attorneys or even firms involved. As in other fields, increasing complexity narrows the number of effective players and opponents.
But like in tax work, what is most necessary to success is to take a birds-eye view of the situation and the entirety of its context, not merely a narrow one of substantive law or procedure. Because factors far outside of that can have vital influence on the final result, the lawyer must be above all result-oriented and withstand the temptation to win battles rather than the war.
In many ways, this combination of rule-based expertise and the ability to zoom in and out of a holistic picture is what makes litigation practice such a mentally rewarding exercise. It is also a very scalable skill, open to a solo practitioner as well as to a case team with dozens of attorneys or even firms involved. As in other fields, increasing complexity narrows the number of effective players and opponents.
Blockchain Technology and Digital Assets
I became interested in blockchain in 2009 during my freshman year in college through Sakoshi Nakamoto’s seminal paper (whoever Sakoshi may be). It spawned my resulting focus on number theory, cryptology, and post-quantum cryptography, but also later research in matters of privacy and national security as well as environmental and energy issues. It seems that any genuine interest born of curiosity in search of practicality has a way of quickly getting all over the place, because that is what nature and reality is. Neither can be neatly confined to topics or disciplines. Such is the power of analogies that it busts any limitations we might wish to produce by creating claims to intellectual property. It is the contrarian approach of finding disproportional value in sharing models and the paradox of non-exclusivity that has unleashed the explosive (or, in 21st century parlance, “disruptive”) growth of technology that evolves faster than legal processes can hope to contain it (or, in 19th century parlance, “adjudicate” it). But we are quickly approaching the point, through AI and other developments, where dialectic adversarial processes and their inherent requirements of time and human deliberation and discourse will lose adequacy for resolving conceptual forces it can no longer control. But should it, in the first place? We have long entered the era of transhumanism where naturally evolved beings merge with the creations of their collective intellect. It seems a natural sequitur that Nick Bostrom and others originally approached the topic from an angle of philosophy and its merger with STEM. My work in bionanotechnology is likely to lead me to exploring a further intersection.
Taxation
It is the oldest form of public-private partnership, although it was not recognized as such through much of history: taxation is every entity’s single largest expense, a perennial source of aggravation and continuous debate. As a partnership, it is largely involuntary, famously certain as death, and the notion of “no taxation without representation” feels quaint when we look at who is capable of effective lobby efforts – the sole “representation” that counts. In every partnership, there is division of labor: things that one partner is very good at may not be the other’s forte. The same is true here: government has proved highly inefficient, incompetent, wasteful, and driven by economically and strategically irrational and futile processes – yet, in many areas of equitable common interest, it is without alternative. Private enterprise is arguably the pinnacle of efficiency and productivity, but also the single greatest generator of inequality and social imbalance. With the 20th century, age of ideologies, a matter of the past, each individual and entity continues to be faced with a cost-benefit analysis of whether incurring tax liability has value. Most billionaires reside in high-tax jurisdictions. New York, London, Moscow, Tokyo, California, Washington – with the exception of Singapore, no place with high concentration of great wealth has earned a reputation as a tax haven but all incentivized and maintained vast opportunities to create significant wealth. This happens by different factors, not just by tax rates: socio-political relevance, talent pool, innovation culture, access to markets, military power, quality of human interaction are all factors. Very few great fortunes or enterprises were created, much less successfully maintained, on some Caribbean or Pacific island or European principality.
Tax law has many things in common with econometrics: increasingly technical, highly consequential over the long term, highly rewarding to creative thought. Like in financial markets, no brilliant idea will go unpunished because imitation will lead to change of rules and operating environments. Intellectual property does not enjoy protection in this context. But like in all social systems – one is reminded of the arms race or of internet surveillance – no success and no inefficiency is ever final, but just a starting point for new, game-changing developments.
Tax work is indispensable as a component of all decision-making. Just like transactional draftsmanship is meaningless apart from the realities of litigation, fiscal structuring and design is not the initiator but an indispensable final touch to business modeling – and ultimately to all legal engineering.
Tax law has many things in common with econometrics: increasingly technical, highly consequential over the long term, highly rewarding to creative thought. Like in financial markets, no brilliant idea will go unpunished because imitation will lead to change of rules and operating environments. Intellectual property does not enjoy protection in this context. But like in all social systems – one is reminded of the arms race or of internet surveillance – no success and no inefficiency is ever final, but just a starting point for new, game-changing developments.
Tax work is indispensable as a component of all decision-making. Just like transactional draftsmanship is meaningless apart from the realities of litigation, fiscal structuring and design is not the initiator but an indispensable final touch to business modeling – and ultimately to all legal engineering.
Entrepreneurial Startups
It is not exactly encouraging that some 90% of business startups fail. Some poorly conceived and funded ones deserve it, but a good percentage of creative, brilliant innovations do not. Not all are high-tech or even high-concept, but most are much more than means to an end – they push the envelope and at the same time invite even bolder visions, more daring concepts. Science fiction has been ahead of science since its dawn – entrepreneurial daring has been ahead of widely adopted applications as Amazon was a bold vision in the days of the book store, $600 million in expenditures prior to generating cash flow. My own history with tech startups goes back a long time – internet technology in Poland, minimally invasive neurosurgical imaging in Sweden (with implications for security technology), quantum dot-aided imaging in the UK, and, certainly not least, innovative litigation finance. It always comes down to the Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences: whoever has the gold makes the rules. No aspect aside from opportunity costs is more important to startups than funding and finance is – uniting the idea with the means to get it off the ground, at win-win terms. The rest basically comes down to adult supervision for a well-chosen team by a well-chosen board. But these are common problems of the Groundhog Day variety: they present themselves at every undertaking that is not a Lone Ranger enterprise. My interest is in arranging early financing rounds for truly compelling ventures by cultivating a pool of aggressively visionary yet financially conservative investors internationally.
Real Estate
Pierre Joseph Proudhon, as usurped by Karl Marx, clearly missed a point or two when he thought of property as ‘theft’: go fit a high rise or a ranch in a getaway truck! Property is, however, an intellectual and political exercise in the art of legitimacy and in the effective fiction of security – a state of affairs where boundaries between fact and fiction tend to blur. You cannot consciously live in a global metropolis without developing a strong interest in real estate. It is all there is, the foundation of the city, its raison d’être (well, in a chicken-and-egg sense of the word). I was intrigued enough to earn my own real estate license upon setting foot and growing roots in my New York. There is no stronger evidence for the fallacy of an America supposedly in decline than the fact that foreign demand snapped up $100 billion worth of U.S. real estate in 2014. Not only did it cause standards to rise but also properties to be more intensely used. What bubble??
Conceptually, I am primarily interested in real estate as infrastructure for complex technology: ports, airports, refineries, turnkey-ready cloned cities, smart cities, environmentally intelligent exploitation of natural resources, and recycling of increasingly rare materials through urban mining.
Among my favorite local resources are REBNY and NYREI, but also The Real Deal.
Conceptually, I am primarily interested in real estate as infrastructure for complex technology: ports, airports, refineries, turnkey-ready cloned cities, smart cities, environmentally intelligent exploitation of natural resources, and recycling of increasingly rare materials through urban mining.
Among my favorite local resources are REBNY and NYREI, but also The Real Deal.