# Draft First Day Motions > Ensures a first-day motions package applies relevant bankruptcy-practice requirements and cross-document consistency checks, including priority-claim, utility, executory-contract, and financing analyses, while flagging discrepancies across filings. - Skill: `finchipaiorg/draft-first-day-motions` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add finchipaiorg/draft-first-day-motions` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/finchipaiorg/draft-first-day-motions/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: FinchipAIOrg (https://skillmd.com/u/finchipaiorg) - Updated: 2026-09-22 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/finchipaiorg/draft-first-day-motions --- # Skill: Draft First-Day Motions Package ## 1. Subject-matter triage - Treat the package as a coordinated set of bankruptcy pleadings plus a sworn officer declaration, not isolated drafts. - Identify the debtor’s operating model, immediate cash needs, workforce exposure, vendor dependencies, utilities, and financing posture before drafting any motion. - If the record contains multiple dates, providers, budgets, claims pools, or milestones, enumerate them first and then draft against each item separately. - If the source set supports only one answer for a category, say so explicitly and explain why the other possibilities are not in scope. ## 2. Failure modes the skill is correcting - Draft omits motion-specific bankruptcy requirements that commonly arise in a first-day package, including priority-claim treatment, utility adequate-assurance mechanics, executory-contract issues, and financing-related relief. - Draft fails to connect facts across documents, such as a cash-flow assumption that conflicts with the motion budget, a milestone that conflicts with the case schedule, or a declaration statement that differs from the motion record. - Draft states a conclusion without grounding it in the controlling Bankruptcy Code provision, rule, or other authority. - Draft does not separate category-level requests from case-specific facts, making the court record harder to follow. - Draft misses operational knock-on issues that should be flagged early, including tax-withholding exposure, reclamation exposure, lien-priority concerns, or workforce-reduction timing. ## 3. Legal frameworks / domain conventions that apply - Priority wages and benefits: apply the Bankruptcy Code’s priority scheme, including 11 U.S.C. § 507(a), when addressing employee-related relief, unpaid prepetition amounts, and any excess or nonpriority portion. - Administrative expense concepts: distinguish prepetition obligations from postpetition administrative obligations under 11 U.S.C. § 503(b) where the source facts require it. - Utilities: analyze adequate assurance under 11 U.S.C. § 366 and the statutory timing window for utility objections or terminations. - Critical vendor and trade support: frame relief as business necessity tied to continued operations, while checking for recent-delivery, reclamation, setoff, or other seller-right issues under the Bankruptcy Code and applicable nonbankruptcy law. - Executory contracts and licenses: consider 11 U.S.C. § 365, including ipso facto issues, assumption/rejection timing, and any consent or cure issues that may affect relief. - Cash management and bank accounts: use Bankruptcy Code and case-law conventions governing ordinary-course use of cash collateral, bank-account access, and account-control mechanics as relevant to the source facts. - DIP financing: analyze financing authority under 11 U.S.C. §§ 364(c) and 364(d) where priming, superpriority, lien grants, or milestones are requested; identify any lien-priority or consent issues. - First-day relief generally: draft requests in a form that aligns with ordinary Chapter 11 practice, including background, legal standard, requested relief, and fact support. - CRO declaration: present sworn factual support for the filing, including qualifications, engagement terms, company overview, capital structure, distress causes, liquidity, hearing timing, and any workforce or tax issues. - Rule-level support: where the motion relies on a procedural or evidentiary proposition, cite the controlling Bankruptcy Rule, local practice, or other authority by name and section where applicable. ## 4. Analytical scaffolds - For each motion, build the analysis from: what relief is sought, what statutory or rule authority supports it, what case-specific facts justify it, what operational risk it addresses, and what relief the proposed order should authorize. - Identify and separate: prepetition vs. postpetition obligations; ordinary-course vs. extraordinary relief; debtor’s estimate vs. actual operating history; and secured-creditor issues vs. trade-creditor issues. - Employee/wage motion: - identify the relevant priority framework, - address any wage, benefit, vacation, bonus, commission, or reimbursement buckets separately if the facts distinguish them, - note tax-withholding and payroll-deduction implications where the officers or managers may face exposure. - Critical vendor motion: - state the requested authorization in case-specific terms, - tie the request to ongoing operations and specific vendor dependencies, - address recent deliveries, potential reclamation assertions, and any offsets or cure obligations suggested by the source materials. - Cash management motion: - describe the debtor’s bank structure and cash flows, - explain why current accounts, locks, sweeps, or controls must be preserved or modified, - identify any inconsistencies among account lists, signatories, balances, or budget assumptions. - DIP motion: - identify each milestone, each condition precedent, and each use restriction separately, - compare any milestone dates to the proposed hearing or case schedule, - flag any lien subordination, priming, release, consent, or budget-variance issue that bears on enforceability. - Utility motion: - list each utility provider and the proposed adequate-assurance treatment for each category of service if the record differentiates them, - compare proposed assurance to the debtor’s actual usage or budgeted utility spend, - anchor the request to the statutory window for protection. - Joint-administration motion: - explain the procedural efficiency rationale, - preserve substantive separateness unless the source facts justify a broader request, - flag any entity-specific mismatch in captions, schedules, service lists, or corporate relationships. - CRO declaration: - use a sworn, first-person factual narrative, - keep qualifications, retention terms, operational overview, liquidity, and case milestones distinct, - identify any facts that would help reconcile discrepancies among the package documents. ## 5. Vertical / structural / temporal relationships - Track entity-by-entity differences if the package involves more than one debtor or affiliate; do not assume identical relief or facts across entities. - Track date-by-date differences between petition date, first-day hearing date, payment dates, cure dates, objection deadlines, and financing milestones. - Track document-to-document consistency on: - debtor names and case captions, - employee counts and payroll periods, - vendor lists and payment ceilings, - utility providers and assurance amounts, - bank accounts and signatories, - DIP milestones and budget assumptions, - factual statements in the declaration versus the motions. - If any discrepancy appears, flag it in the motion where it matters and in the declaration if the discrepancy affects sworn facts. ## 6. Output structure conventions - Produce each requested document as a standalone draft with bankruptcy-conventional headings and internal logic. - Use a standard motion structure: Introduction or Relief Requested, Background, Legal Standard, Argument, and Proposed Order, with case-specific facts integrated where they belong. - Include proposed orders as exhibits within each motion package, drafted to track the relief requested and to avoid unexplained overbreadth. - For the CRO declaration, use a declaration format with numbered paragraphs, sworn factual statements, and a signature block suitable for filing. - Keep the relief language precise and order-ready; avoid narrative summaries in place of operative text. - Surface cross-document discrepancies explicitly, using a short note in the relevant document rather than relying on a separate omnibus list. - When a legal proposition is used, cite the controlling authority by name and section in the body of the draft. - Before finalizing, verify that each deliverable exists, is non-empty, and contains operative drafting rather than a description of what the motion would say. - The package should read as a coordinated first-day filing set, not as seven unrelated memoranda.