Jan Adriaanse’s research while affiliated with Leiden University and other places

Insolvency practitioners (IPs) manage and liquidate bankrupt estates. While their primary responsibility lies in prioritizing the interests of the collective creditors, they must also consider various other (societal) interests in their decision making. The law typically grants IPs discretion in balancing these interests, but this flexibility leads to variability in bankruptcy proceedings, resulting in legal uncertainty and inequality. This paper aims to introduce the reader to the psychological concept of noise (variability in judgments or decisions that ought to be identical) and to highlight the considerable level of variability in IPs’ decisions when balancing interests. More specifically, using examples from empirical studies we conducted in the Netherlands, the paper demonstrates how stakeholders in bankruptcy proceedings are at the mercy of IPs’ subjective judgements and that there is very little uniformity in their judgments. To reduce the level of legal uncertainty and inequality, this paper proposes further clarification on how IPs should navigate and balance interests in insolvency proceedings.

Contract automation is a challenging topic within Artificial Intelligence and LegalTech. From digitised contracts via smart contracts, we are heading towards Intelligent Contracts (iContracts). We will address the main challenge of iContracts: the handling of communications and risk data in contract automation. Our Research Question reads: to what extent is it possible to develop an ontology that automates contracts with communications and risk data? The article designs and conceptualises an iContract ontology. Our findings validate the conceptual expressiveness of our ontology. A brief discussion highlights the value of the ontology design and its application domains. From the results, we may conclude that the current method is innovative and that further research is necessary for handling more complex use cases.

This article adopts a psychological lens to investigate whether cognitive biases might obscure insolvency practitioners’ perceptions. Through an experimental study among members of INSOL International (N = 272), we find that insolvency practitioners’ judgments of business valuations and business valuators in an insolvency situation are affected by (1) the degree of perceived similarity with the valuator (i.e. similarity bias) and (2) the outcome of a bankruptcy deal in which a valuation is used (i.e. outcome bias), such that their judgments are more favourable in case of higher perceived similarity and in case of a positive outcome. Furthermore, we find that male insolvency practitioners have more trust in male valuators than in female valuators, suggesting that (3) gender biases play a role as well. These findings shine a light on decision-making in business rescue and bankruptcy cases and the insolvency industry in general. The findings call for further research on cognitive biases in insolvency-related matters including possible implications for policymakers.