Estates and wind-downs

Data is an asset of the estate, and it expires.

For assignees, trustees, liquidators, administrators and founders closing a company. Its records are something AI data buyers now make offers for. The accounts that hold them are deleted on a schedule that starts when the subscriptions lapse.

A bankrupt airline's archive drew three bidders.

In the Chapter 11 case of Spirit Airlines, the company's email, documents, tickets and code were put up for sale as an asset. The opening bid was $5M. The winning bid was $10M, and a third buyer offered $12.5M after the auction closed.

Smaller estates are usually sold privately, often to one buyer, with no second bid. Reported prices for a shut-down startup's archive run $10K to $100K per company.

Docket summary

Every bid, from the docket

01Opening bid (Google)
$5M
02Backup bid (Mercor)
$7.5M
03Winning bid (Google)
$10M
04Late offer (micro1)
$12.5M

The court has not yet approved that sale. Unions, a software vendor and a supplier objected to parts of it, which is why the rights work comes before any buyer.

What happens to the data when the bills stop.

A company at the end has little cash, so software subscriptions are among the first things cancelled. Each vendor then deletes on its own schedule.

The deletion countdown

How long cancelled software accounts keep their data
System	Kept for	What the vendor says
Google Workspace	No recovery window stated	On cancellation the data "will be deleted and can't be restored". Deletion can take up to 90 days to complete.
Jira and Confluence Cloud	60 days	After cancellation the data is kept 60 days (15 for trials), then "permanently deleted and cannot be recovered".
Microsoft 365	180 days at most	An expired subscription is disabled, then deleted. Microsoft deletes customer data no more than 180 days after expiry or termination.
Slack, if downgraded to free	One year, rolling	A workspace on the free plan loses messages and files more than one year old, permanently, on a rolling basis.

Google Workspace
Kept for
No recovery window stated
What the vendor says
On cancellation the data "will be deleted and can't be restored". Deletion can take up to 90 days to complete.
Jira and Confluence Cloud
Kept for
60 days
What the vendor says
After cancellation the data is kept 60 days (15 for trials), then "permanently deleted and cannot be recovered".
Microsoft 365
Kept for
180 days at most
What the vendor says
An expired subscription is disabled, then deleted. Microsoft deletes customer data no more than 180 days after expiry or termination.
Slack, if downgraded to free
Kept for
One year, rolling
What the vendor says
A workspace on the free plan loses messages and files more than one year old, permanently, on a rolling basis.

The first job in any wind-down is therefore not the sale. It is an admin export, or keeping the accounts paid for sixty days, so that there is something left to sell.

How we work with you: no recovery, no fee

The fee scale

We put the data before more than one buyer

The same datasheet goes to every interested buyer, on one deadline. You see every offer, and you can put it before the court or the creditors where your appointment requires it.

We do the work you have no time for

The inventory, the checklist of what must be excluded, the datasheet, and a plan for who removes personal data and to what standard, with its cost settled in the licence.

We are paid from the proceeds

Only the holder pays us, a fee fixed in the mandate, and only if a sale closes. In a sale we run no buyer pays us, so our fee depends on what you are paid, not on which buyer pays it. A buyer pays us only if you choose to apply to it through its own referral programme, and you see that amount before you choose. Our fee is subject to whatever approval your appointment requires.

The consents a sale needs.

Whoever controls the assets: the board and shareholders, the assignee, or the court-appointed officeholder.
A secured lender with a lien over intellectual property or all assets.
The court, where the appointment requires approval of a sale.
Counterparties whose confidential material sits inside the archive, unless it is excluded.
Earlier privacy promises, which travel with the data into any sale.

In Europe, start with what is not personal data.

The Dutch data protection authority has said personal data should not be sold out of a bankruptcy without consent, a Dutch court upheld a privacy fine on a trustee in 2025, and German lawyers expect regulators to view selling email and chat archives for AI training as extremely critical. Those archives are the hardest part of any European estate.

TvI 2026/7, the Dutch regulator and the trustee fine, 19 Jan 2026 Börsen-Zeitung, German practice, 18 Aug 2026

Source code, product and process documentation, engineering files and machine logs usually carry little personal data, and are often the part of a European estate that can be sold first, once the rights are checked.

This is research, not legal advice.

Tell us what the estate holds. We aim to answer within two working days.

Value the estate's data See what is left before deletion