For 28 years, Alan Grochal has been representing debtors, creditors, and creditors’ committees in Chapter 11 proceedings, workouts, liquidations, and financial restructurings. Mr. Grochal chairs the firm’s Creditors’ Rights/Bankruptcy Department. He and his team have achieved favorable results for clients in a variety of industries, including commercial and residential real estate.
Mr. Grochal is equally experienced in the context of bankruptcy litigation and out-of-court workouts. His practice includes the representation of:
- Trustees;
- Creditors’ committees;
- Secured creditors;
- Unsecured creditors;
- Debtors in Chapter 11 proceedings; and
- Creditors in Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 proceedings.
Creditors’ Rights
He has served as lead counsel to creditors in a number of important cases involving hundreds of millions of dollars of debt. He represented the creditors’ committee in one of the largest Chapter 11 bankruptcies ever filed in Maryland, Combined Properties, Inc., a property management firm for 43 shopping centers; as a result of Mr. Grochal’s efforts, his clients recovered 100 percent of the money the debtor owed them. Similarly, he successfully represented a major lender in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Sunterra, a real estate investment trust that developed and owned timeshare properties internationally.
Mr. Grochal has represented creditors’ committees in numerous other large Chapter 11 cases involving companies in a variety of industries, including an industrial painting contractor, a box company, a book publisher, a warehousing and distribution company, a shipyard, a retail chain of furniture stores, and a medical equipment manufacturer.
Mr. Grochal is currently representing creditors’ committees in several regional residential homebuilder cases, in which his extensive experience in the real estate industry has proved invaluable. He serves as co-counsel to the creditors’ committee in the Chapter 11 case of TMST, Inc., formerly known as Thornburg Mortgage, Inc., a publicly traded, New Mexico-based subprime lender. Under his supervision, the bankruptcy group at Tydings & Rosenberg, also advises Chrysler Financial, a secured creditor in the liquidation of several auto dealerships in the State of Maryland.
Debtor Representation
Mr. Grochal’s debtor representations have included a psychiatric hospital, a chain of 75 primary care physician practices, a stevedoring company, a company that invents and manufactures medical equipment, and a sports management company. He currently represents Montgomery County, Maryland’s largest taxi company in its reorganization; he has fashioned an innovative reorganization plan by which the company will sell its taxi licenses directly to drivers, thus shifting the insurance burden away from the company and generating revenue to repay creditors in full plus interest.
An experienced appellate attorney, Mr. Grochal also represented a high-profile client in In re Solomon, 67 F.3d 1128 (4th Cir. 1995), an historically significant appellate case that established that individual retirement accounts are exempt under Maryland law and do not constitute disposable income under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
Leadership
Mr. Grochal was an instructor for the Maryland Institute for Continuing Professional Education of Lawyers for 15 years, and he has been a frequent speaker for accountants, credit managers, and judges. He also served on the Board of Directors of the Bankruptcy Bar Association of Maryland (1995-1996).
Mr. Grochal was selected by his peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America® 2011 in the field of Bankruptcy and Creditor-Debtor Rights Law. He has been selected for inclusion continuously since 2009. (Copyright 2010 by Woodward/White, Inc., of Aiken, S.C.) In 2010 and 2011, Mr. Grochal received recognition for his work in the area of bankruptcy/creditors rights in Benchmark Litigation, a publication of Euromoney/Legal Media Group.
Mr. Grochal was also named by the Maryland Super Lawyers Magazine as one of the top attorneys in Maryland for 2011 for his bankruptcy and creditor/debtor rights practice. In fact, in 2011 he was named one of the top 50 attorneys in the state. He has been listed in Maryland Super Lawyers magazine since 2007. Only five percent of the lawyers in the state are named by Super Lawyers. The selections are made by the research team at Super Lawyers, which is a service of the Thomson Reuters, Legal Division. Mr. Grochal is AV® Peer Review Rated – the highest possible peer review rating from Martindale-Hubbell.
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