Less than three years later, the generic US drugmaker ran out of money and laid everyone off. Akorn is back in bankruptcy court — this time to be sold for parts.

It's one of 12 firms this year to seek bankruptcy protection for a second or even third time after initial attempts at court-supervised rehabilitation failed. So-called Chapter 22 filings — industry slang for repeat bankruptcies — are piling up at the fastest rate since the Great Recession, according to BankruptcyData.

The trend is both a sign of how fragile the US economy has become and a failure of the bankruptcy system, considered among the best in the world. Its focus on rehabilitating troubled companies rather than quickly winding them down saves thousands of jobs each year — but it assumes that pausing debt collection, tearing up costly contracts and forcing losses on creditors is more than just a way to delay inevitable liquidation.

"Judges aren't thrilled to see a debtor come back, nobody wants it to happen," said Lindsey Simon, a law professor at the University of Georgia who studies bankruptcies. "It means bankruptcy failed."

The 11 repeat bankruptcies filed through April already tops the tally for all of 2021 or 2022 and the spate of Chapter 22 filings through the first four months of the year has been eclipsed only once since 2000, according to BankruptcyData.

David's Bridal LLC, the biggest wedding retailer in the US, and Catalina Marketing — maker of well-known coupons — discount retailer Tuesday Morning, telecommunications company Avaya and data firm Inap — all fell back into bankruptcy this year. Home security and alarm company Monitronics International Inc. plans to file a second bankruptcy by mid-May, after an earlier Chapter 11 in 2019.

Such relapses follow common threads. Sometimes a company did not get enough debt off its balance sheet the first time. Or it didn't shed unprofitable parts of the business when it had the chance, dooming its prospects when interest rates rose, or inflation forced costs higher.