Laura Coordes, Professor of Law, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University

The Risky Health Care Business

What she does: Professor Coordes is a Professor of Law at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law in Phoenix, Arizona. Her research focuses on bankruptcy and financial distress and includes commercial law, large corporate reorganizations, international and comparative insolvency law, and local government finance and policy. She teaches Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, Advanced Bankruptcy, Secured Transactions, and Contracts. Professor Coordes is on the board of the American Bankruptcy Law Journal, a member of the American Bankruptcy Institute, and has presented her work and perspectives nationally, including The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! Finance, and Bloomberg Law.

On risk: "It's important to be looking at the bigger picture, the industry pressures, the interconnectedness of the whole industry, and some of the big challenges that the industry as a whole is facing to try to figure out, okay, how can we really create some stability in health care … Indicators or factors can really impact and pressure the market, and in turn, can then impact and pressure individual health care businesses … Distress or closure of a health care business can cause ripple effects. So even if, on a narrow level, a particular health care business is doing fine, that could change fairly quickly, depending on what's going on in the nearby area or in the industry as a whole. And so I think if you're running a health care business, you have to be concerned, of course, about your own business and its financial health, but also about what's going on and with the other health care businesses in your area … What's challenging for an individual health care business, there's so much that you have to take into account that is outside of just the four walls of your own business."