A guide for liquidators and assignees on digital assets

When a company enters liquidation or an assignment for the benefit of creditors, the asset inventory usually starts with what is easy to see: bank balances, receivables, equipment, perhaps a domain name or a codebase. The company's operational records rarely make the list. For many closed software and services businesses, those records are now one of the few assets that can still produce cash.

Most closed companies leave behind years of chat history, email, documents, tickets, code, CRM records and support conversations. AI labs license this kind of data, anonymized, to train and evaluate agents that do workplace tasks. Typical licences range from $20K to $400K+, depending on years of history, headcount, the number of systems and, above all, how well the same work can be traced from one tool to another.

Unlike equipment, this asset is not sold outright. The company grants a licence for training and evaluation use, and buyers are contractually barred from marketing to, profiling, contacting or re-identifying anyone in the data. Because the licence does not transfer ownership, it may be able to sit alongside other realizations, such as a sale of the codebase or the domain, provided the terms of those deals allow it. The distinction is explained in licensing vs. selling data.

Consider a hypothetical 50-person software company that closed after six years. Its laptops may fetch little and its code may find no buyer, but its chat, email, ticketing, code and CRM history together describe six years of product work in detail. That kind of history is hard for AI labs to find anywhere else.

The value depends on the accounts still existing. Software providers suspend and eventually delete workspaces when bills go unpaid, and the people who held admin rights have often left by the time an office-holder is appointed. Early in the engagement, it is worth establishing:

• Which systems the company used: chat, email, docs, ticketing and project tools, code hosting, CRM, support desk and finance tools
• Who holds owner or super-admin rights in each, and whether those rights can be recovered or transferred
• When each subscription renews or lapses, and what the provider does with data after cancellation
• Whether former employees or contractors still have access that should be removed

Paying for one more billing cycle on a few core tools is often modest relative to what the data might realize. The specifics depend on each provider's terms, so check them before letting anything lapse. Our wind-down checklist goes into more detail on preserving records.

Where possible, avoid exporting raw data to personal drives or ad hoc storage as a stopgap. Keeping it in its original systems under controlled admin access is usually simpler, and it limits how many people have handled raw personal data.

A director, officer, liquidator or assignee with authority over the company's assets can sign a data licence. We ask for the authority document at the start, before scoping or evaluation, so there is no question later about who can bind the company. Depending on the jurisdiction and the type of proceeding, that might be an appointment order, an assignment instrument or a board resolution.

Payment goes to the company entity, not to any individual. That keeps the proceeds inside the estate, where they can be dealt with under the normal process. For more on signing authority in different situations, see who can sign a data licence when a company is closing.

This is general information, not legal advice. Office-holders should involve their own counsel on authority, any court approval required and how the proceeds are treated.

Office-holders are rightly cautious about anything involving personal data. The process is designed to keep the estate's exposure low and well documented.

The company sets the scope and exclusions, and they are annexed to the contract before any data moves. HR, payroll, medical and legally privileged folders are excluded by default, as are direct messages unless the company includes them and has the right to. Specific customers, channels or folders can be excluded too, which matters when former clients had confidentiality terms.

Anonymization happens in-house, and no third party touches the raw data. Every person, company, address, email, phone number and account becomes a consistent token across every tool. Credentials, API keys, card numbers and government IDs are removed outright, and faces, logos and signatures in images and PDFs are blacked out. The office-holder reviews an anonymized sample before delivery. The raw archive is deleted within 30 days of sign-off, as a contract obligation, and a deletion certificate is issued for the file.

Office-holders are often running many matters at once. The seller side takes about an hour in total, spread across a 15-minute intro call, granting read-only access for the evaluation and reviewing the anonymized sample. Payment to the company entity follows in two to four weeks.

No firm number is given before the data is counted. The evaluation measures what is actually there, and the offer reflects it. If the data turns out to be thin, that is useful to know early, and the cost to the estate has been an hour of time.

Some practitioners also find it helps to raise the question at the first meeting with the outgoing directors. They know which tools held the real work, where the admin credentials are and whether any customers had unusual confidentiality terms, and that knowledge often leaves with them.

If digital records are a recurring question in your practice, it helps to have a standing contact who can tell you quickly whether a given company's data is worth preserving. We work with liquidators, assignees, insolvency lawyers and the advisors around them. Learn about partnering with us.