Bob Wessels. Bob Wessels is the co-founder and Partner of Holland Van Gijzen Attorneys at Law, Rotterdam, The Netherlands and Professor of Business Law, Law Faculty, Vrije University in Amsterdam. Dr. Wessels is the immediate past Chairman of the Ernst and Young Law Alliance, comprising some 3000 lawyers in 70 countries (1997-2002); Dean of the Civil Law Department of the Law Faculty of Vrije University (1992-1994); Served as Technical Consultant to the World Bank and the IMF in Georgia and Indonesia respectively. He presently advises clients, including non-Dutch parties, on matters of (international) corporate reconstruction and insolvency law and serves as an advisor for cases handled by partners of his firm, e.g. Versatel, Aino and UPC, some of them containing cross-border insolvency aspects, including concurrent proceedings in the Netherlands and abroad. He is Doctor of Law Ph.

D., Vrije University, Amsterdam, 1988; Founder and first chief-editor (1995-1997) of Tijdschrift voor Insolventierecht. (Dutch Insolvency Law Review). Member of Insol Europe (formerly European Insolvency Practitioners Association, EIPA), the International Insolvency Institute (III), the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI), and Committee J (Insolvency and Creditors Rights) of the International Bar Association; From 1998-2000 Co-chaired the Insolvency Treaties Committee. Publications (in Dutch) include (co-)authorship of some twenty books on topics of Corporate, Contract and Banking Law.The Honorable Bruce A. Markell (United States Bankruptcy Judge for the District of Nevada). Bruce A.

Markell was sworn in as the third bankruptcy judge in the District of Nevada on July 9, 2004. He came to the bench from the academy; since 1999, he had been the Doris S. and Theodore B. Lee Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he taught Contracts, Commercial Law, Securitization and Bankruptcy. He maintains a position at the Boyd School of Law as a Senior Fellow in Bankruptcy and Commercial Law. Judge Markell is a 1977 graduate of Pitzer College, and a 1980 graduate of the King Hall School of Law, University of California at Davis, where he was first in his class and editor-in-chief of the law review. Following graduation, he clerked for then-judge Anthony M.

Kennedy when Justice Kennedy was a member of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before becoming an academic in 1990, he was a partner in the Los Angeles office of Sidley and Austin, specializing in workouts and bankruptcy matters. From 1990 to 1999, he taught at the Indiana University School of Law at Bloomington. During 1999, he was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He has also visiting at Emory University School of Law and King Hall School of Hall at University of California at Davis. While an academic, he served in an Of Counsel capacity to Ancel and Dunlap (Indianapolis, 1996-2000) and Stutman, Treister and Glatt, Professional Corporation (Los Angeles, 2001-2004). In 1999 he was elected a conferee of the National Bankruptcy Conference (where he currently serves on the Executive Committee).

In 1997 he was selected as a member of the American Law Institute, and in 2000 he was selected as a member of the International Insolvency Institute and as a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy. He has served as an advisor on bankruptcy and secured transaction reform to the Republic of Indonesia, was the International Bar Association''s representative to UNCITRAL''s creation of a model law on the assignment of international receivables, and was asked by the United Nations to be an expert consultant to its project to create a legislative guide for secured transactions. Judge Markell is the author of numerous articles on bankruptcy and commercial law.Jason Kilborn teaches business and commercial law (including bankruptcy) at John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Before joining the academy, he spent two years in practice as an associate with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton in New York and Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering in Washington, D.C., focusing on bankruptcy litigation and corporate reorganization. Professor Kilborn has developed a specialization in the comparative analysis of legal regimes for combating consumer financial distress.