Maxwell, Lloyd’s of London, Barings, BCCI… in recent years, if these cases were mentioned at all it was in the context of the decline in big-ticket litigation and the need to clamp down on spiralling legal costs.
But at the Legal Week Litigation Forum this morning, these cases were being referred to in a distinctly different light – not as dinosaurs on the verge of extinction, but as examples of what could happen in the wake of Monday’s collapse of Lehman Brothers, an event conference chair Lord Falconer colourfully described as “the largest insolvency in the history of capitalism”.
