Can a company in administration or bankruptcy sell its data?

A company’s working record (its Slack, email, tickets, wikis, documents and databases) is company property. In administration, bankruptcy or an assignment for the benefit of creditors, control of that property passes to whoever runs the estate, who can license it like other assets for the creditors’ benefit. Who can sign is the main question, and the estate’s lawyer answers it. This is general information, not legal advice.

Customer personal data is a separate asset with its own rules. The buyers named here license the company’s own operating record and remove or replace personal details.

The officeholder signs, not the founder

Filing for bankruptcy, entering administration or signing an assignment for the benefit of creditors generally moves authority over the company’s assets to the trustee, administrator or assignee. A founder who still has admin rights to the Slack workspace can export it, but licensing it becomes the estate’s decision.

A founder can still protect the asset: take full exports before plans lapse, write down which tools hold what, and tell the officeholder early. An administrator who learns on day one that the company holds six years of engineering channels can treat them as an asset. One who learns after the workspace was deleted cannot.

Put the records on the asset list beside the IP

The operating record has no line on the balance sheet, so it is easy to miss. List it with the IP and the domain names.

Four buyers license this kind of record. micro1 has a partnership for companies no longer operating, with 50+ employees at peak and substantial Slack or Teams history. Scale and Mode work with the company’s live systems. Maryah publishes no size or country limit. Each takes a license or a copy, so the company keeps its original records.

Scale and Mode need live systems to work from, so a sale window that keeps the systems running gives the estate more buyers than one that cancels them on appointment.

A buyer checks the signatory’s authority

A buyer licensing from an insolvent company needs to see that the person signing can bind the estate. In a US bankruptcy, 11 U.S. Code 363 lets the trustee sell or lease estate property outside the ordinary course of business after notice and a hearing, so a records license will often need a court order, and that order is the paper a buyer asks for. UK administration and other regimes have their own rules. The estate’s lawyer confirms which apply.

In an assignment for the benefit of creditors, the assignee holds the assets listed in the assignment agreement. Check with the assignee’s lawyer that the asset schedule, or its general language, covers records and data.

Customer personal data has its own rules

Section 363(b)(1) restricts the sale of personally identifiable information. If the company’s privacy policy barred sharing such data with unaffiliated parties, the trustee may sell it only if the sale fits the policy, or if the court approves it after appointing a consumer privacy ombudsman and holding a hearing.

That is a reason to keep customer data out of a records license. Scale states that employee and customer identities never leave the company, and micro1 says personal information is removed when relevant. The internal record of how the team worked is the asset, and it doesn’t need the customer database. Get legal advice before anything that touches customer data is licensed.

Keep the systems alive while the sale runs

Slack’s paid plans keep messages and files for the lifetime of the workspace by default. On the free plan, data older than one year (or 90 days, if the owner chose that) is removed on a rolling basis. A downgrade to save money during the proceedings can erase years of history before the asset is valued. The same goes for Google Workspace, Jira and the support desk. Our guide to selling company data after a shutdown lists the export steps for each tool.

Keep the authority papers, live systems and dated exports

• The appointment order, assignment agreement or filing that gives the officeholder authority, with the asset schedule.
• Admin credentials for Slack, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, Jira and the support desk, held by someone the officeholder controls.
• Paid plans kept running through the sale window.
• Full exports of chat, email, tickets, wiki and databases, dated.
• The company’s privacy policy as it stood at filing, for the customer-data question.
• A one-page inventory: tools, years of history, headcount at peak, and the industry.