With all of the law reform initiatives announced recently I’ve been giving a few seminars and webinars on different aspects of insolvency law. While I enjoy doing this (if you’d like me to give a talk for your firm please contact me), I’ve also enjoyed just talking to colleagues about where are at with insolvency reform, how the laws are working on the ground and where we might be going in the future. I find that speaking with people in other jurisdictions and with local practitioners gives me a better perspective on how the law is working, and how it might work better. This is particularly useful as I come to the end of the PhD studies on voluntary administration as it helps guide my law reform ideas for the conclusion of my thesis. As a full-time academic, I get paid by the Government to think and write about law reform, so connecting with a broad audience is an important part of my job. Speaking with local practitioners, businesspeople and those in Government helps to focus my research and to make it (hopefully) more practical and relevant.

This led me to reach out to Dr David Goldman (Partner, Norton Rose Fulbright Sydney) and Dr John Tribe (University of Liverpool), both friends and colleagues that I’ve known for many years. We had a wide ranging discussion recently about Australia’s proposed SME insolvency and restructuring reforms. We contrasted these proposals with recent reforms in England. The discussion goes for just under an hour. I’m not seeing this as a formal podcast at this stage, but rather a discussion between colleagues-the type of chat we’d have over coffee or after work. I’ve not produced this audio file with intros and transitions between topics, and the audio quality is about as much as I can afford with equipment bought on an academic’s salary. I don’t have a recording studio, so we just recorded this over a Zoom call recently from our respective offices.

This is just a chat amongst insolvency law colleagues, and I thought some others might be interested in listening in. We plan on doing this again soon, and if people find it useful, I can put together some notes with references to material we discuss and provide timestamps to different topics. For this first discussion, I wanted to keep it informal. If there is a topic that you’d like us to cover, please let me know.