Rite Aid (RAD) has officially filed for bankruptcy while struggling with piling debt and ongoing opioid lawsuits. Yahoo Finance’s Josh Schafer reports on the story and deep dives into the unique nature of the pharmacy chain's Chapter 11 filing.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

[VIDEO LOGO] RACHELLE AKUFFO: Rite Aid has officially filed for bankruptcy protection as it grapples with escalating debt and lawsuits alleging its involvement in the opioid crisis.

And while it's not the first retailer to go through financial troubles, this time may look a little different.

Yahoo Finance's Josh Schafer has those details for us.

Hey, Josh JOSH SCHAFER: Yeah, Rachelle.

So the Rite Aid bankruptcy filing that we got last night, on Sunday night, is an interesting chapter 11 filing for several reasons.

So first off, there is the traditional retail aspect of this.

Rite Aid wants to close some stores.

They'll be able to get out of some of those leases via chapter 11 bankruptcy and write-off some of the dead rent that they had been paying on stores that weren't even open anymore throughout this process.

But I did speak with some bankruptcy lawyers this morning to better understand this story for us.

And Eric Snyder, the chairman of the Bankruptcy Department at law firm Wilk Auslander explained to me two key things to look for in this.

One that would make this case different is who could really buy Rite Aid?

When you think about the antitrust laws that have been so closely tracked recently, you would really only look at CVS and Walgreens.

Would that become an antitrust concern if one of those companies wanted to acquire Rite Aid?

That's an interesting spin on this.

And then you mentioned off the top Rachelle, that opioid crisis and the lawsuits coming from the opioid crisis.

The reason that is so interesting here is because when we go to bankruptcy court, the claimants on then are now going to have to claim separate claims in bankruptcy court.

So everyone that was suing Rite Aid to have to do the opioid crisis now has to file their own claim.

And what it does is it puts it under one court, which helps Rite Aid in the sense that instead of going to 50 different states to deal with 50 different cases at minimum really a lot more, they'll now work through one court, which helps Rite Aid settle this.

And one thing that Snyder told me, he's worked in these cases before he worked on the Purdue Pharma case.

He said, these claimants are going to be unsecured creditors.