Case Study
Strategic Contract Review Helps Airline Soar Through Bankruptcy
FTI Technology worked with a global airline to realize significant cost savings through organization, analysis, rejection and re-negotiation of more than 40,000 contracts during restructuring proceedings.
Situation
An international airline filed for Chapter 11 protection after hitting a roadblock on a more than $700 million cost-cutting program. The company was crippled by billions of dollars in aircraft lease obligations and long-term debt. As part of its restructuring, the company needed to quickly review 40,000 contracts to meet Schedule G filing requirements and determine whether it should accept or reject each contract during the bankruptcy process.
Our Role
FTI Consulting’s Corporate Finance team was already engaged and providing advisory support in connection with the restructuring. The Contract Solutions team within FTI Technology was asked to help deliver a thorough and efficient contract review. Aside from the sheer volume of documents in scope, contracts varied widely and were nuanced according to unique factors within the highly-regulated airline industry.
FTI Technology organized documents by vendor, grouped documents together that were part of the same contract, prioritized the most important contracts representing more than $10 million in annual spend, identified contracts that had already expired or were expiring in the next year, and associated each contract to one of the client’s more than 30 global business units.
Ensuring a timely filing for the Schedule G list of executory contract and unexpired leases was only the beginning. The team also held workshops with procurement leads and key stakeholders for each business unit to review commercial relationship and contract terms for each vendor, ultimately determining whether to accept, reject or re-negotiate each contract. Results were entered into a proprietary claims management system to identify the claims that were associated with each contract.
Our Impact
Leveraging the proprietary tools and processes within FTI Technology’s Contract Solutions offering, the client saved hundreds of thousands of dollars over a manual contract review.
Helped the client unlock millions of dollars in value by rejecting, renegotiating or accepting each contract with full visibility into contract terms, the underlying commercial relationship, and costs and damages from related claims.
This effort provided a foundation to support the client in emerging from bankruptcy with a viable and profitable business.