Welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy's Daily Briefing. It's Tuesday, March 3. In today's briefing, warring lenders to Serta Simmons Bedding resumed a longstanding feud over a landmark liability management exercise. In Los Angeles, famously bankrupt and graffiti-covered towers found a buyer. And the Trump administration backed off its efforts to punish law firms aligned with its political enemies.

Serta Lenders Resume Battle After Appellate Court Reversal

Serta Simmons Bedding lenders returned to bankruptcy court Monday to battle over the validity of a controversial 2020 debt transaction that excluded a group of creditors, who say the maneuver cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

The weeklong proceedings follow a landmark 2024 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which reversed a lower-court ruling blessing the mattress maker’s 2020 debt restructuring that handed control of the company to a majority lender group.

In June 2020, Serta struck a deal with a group of its lenders for roughly $200 million in fresh financing while restructuring roughly $1.3 billion of existing debt. The transaction created new superpriority loans held by the participating group, effectively subordinating the debt held by excluded lenders.

L.A.’s notorious trio of graffiti-covered skyscrapers finally finds a buyer. A graffiti-covered property that towers over downtown Los Angeles is poised for rebirth, after its largest creditors agreed to buy the notoriously stalled project out of bankruptcy. The buyers have agreed, as a condition of the deal, to obtain financing of up to $800 million to finish the property’s construction.

• Market ‘dispersion’ is hitting levels not seen in decades. The S&P 500 is clinging to an unremarkable yearly gain, up less than 1% in 2026. But at the single-stock level, swings have been violent. The violence of the underlying moves makes some nervous, because periods of what Wall Street calls “dispersion” have sometimes preceded market corrections.

White House drops defense of law-firm sanctions. The Trump administration abandoned its defense of the president’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms, punctuating a year of turmoil that rocked the legal industry and forced its leaders to choose between taking on the White House or capitulating. The administration had lost its battle in court, but the executive orders nonetheless put a lasting chill on the industry.

Share your tips, suggestions and feedback with the WSJ Pro Bankruptcy team: Alexander Gladstone; Jodi Xu Klein; Akiko Matsuda; Alicia McElhaney; Andrew Scurria; Becky Yerak. 

Follow us on X: @gladstonea; @jodixu; @AskAkiko; @AliciaMcElhaney; @AndrewScurria; @beckyyerak.