Sydney Forum traces its origins to 2025, when a small group of insolvency practitioners began meeting to speak candidly, off the record, about the market, live pressures and distressed situations before positions hardened. Making time to have meaningful conversations became a habit. That habit became a discipline.
Today the Forum convenes four times a year. Every session admits by application and introduction and is held under the Chatham House rule. The premise hasn’t changed: the value is in the room, and the room is only as good as the judgement of the people in it.
We stay deliberately small. We would rather turn away a qualified applicant than dilute the candour that makes one Forum evening worth more than a year of conferences.
Three sessions are anchored in Sydney. The fourth takes the Forum offshore, bringing global perspectives to Sydney and taking Sydney’s restructuring and insolvency community to the world. Sydney to the world, the world to Sydney.
The technical bodies cover the profession well, and they cover it at scale. Updates, CPD, the formal calendar. This is not that.
The hardest part of this work is rarely technical. It is the weight of the calls, the pressure, and the cost of getting it wrong, usually carried alone. Sydney Forum exists for that part: a small group of people who know the work from the inside, who you can sit with, speak plainly to, and call when a matter is going sideways.
Members back each other. Not because a charter says so, but because they have sat in the same rooms and know what the work asks of you. That is the difference between a network and a directory.
Every session is off the record under the Chatham House rule. What’s said in the room stays in the room. That’s the whole point.
Admission is by application and review, never purchase. The cap is deliberate. Scarcity is what keeps the room worth joining.
No vendor sells from our stage. Sponsorship is light-touch and never compromises the agenda or the rule.
Senior practitioners who set the agenda, review every application, and chair the room. Names published with member consent.