“It’s not just about doing the right things,
but doing things the right way.”
Peter Drucker
German insolvency law has been a permanent construction site since the end of the 1970s. This truism will not change even after the SanInsFoG came into force at the beginning of 2021 (see here), as the EU Commission’s efforts to harmonise national insolvency regimes show (here). And it is precisely these EU efforts that, in case of doubt, are more likely to have forced Germany to change its perspective than the previous purely national reforms. After all, the introduction of a “pre-insolvency restructuring procedure” (based on EU requirements) in the form of the StaRUG (see most recently here) and the limitation of the insolvency periods and thus filing obligations, which in the meantime have become quite excessive, chosen by the SanInsFoG to fit into German law should actually direct the focus more on the (out-of-court) restructuring of companies than on insolvency resolution. Nevertheless, I have the impression that the professional discussions are more focused on further increasing the efficiency of insolvency law (“are we doing things right?”) than on increasing effectiveness towards more (sustainable) restructurings.