Timing is everything. Hitting a round ball with a cylindrical bat is a matter of timing. Bankruptcy practice is no different.  Picking when to file a client’s case may be as important as the decision to file or the choice of chapter. As we approach year’s end, taxes pop to mind as a reason not […]

Bankruptcy cases in our offices have a relatively short life span and our involvement in our client’s life ends soon. When the case is over, do you dissect the case and evaluate what went right and not-so-right? Greg Lambert, one of the authors of 3 Geeks and a LawBlog, suggested that firms conduct an After Action Review […]

We get so caught up in putting the right stuff in the right place on the bankruptcy schedules that it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. Having learned that assets subject to a spendthrift trust provision aren’t property of the estate,  we omit them from the schedules.  Patterson v. Shumate. Forgetting, of course, […]

Twenty years in, it’s still undecided. We have no uniform rule on what happens to equity in an asset, built up during a Chapter 13 plan, when the case converts to Chapter 7. Amazingly, nearly 20 years after subsection (f) was added to 348, courts are split on how it works.  But another court has […]

Talk to Chuck and lose your IRA? That’s the prospect suggested by a recent bankruptcy case from ED TN  featured in the ABI Journal this month. In a nutshell, the case held that lien granting language in the standard Merrill Lynch brokerage account agreement was a prohibited transaction with respect to an IRA. Daley, 459 […]

Once upon a time,  a raft of  consumer bankruptcy lawyers were lost in Googleland. The landscape was littered with pandas and penguins. No one could find the lawyers;  the lawyers  couldn’t find clients…. Is that a familiar tale? For some enterprising lawyers, the story will have a happy ending.  They will spend a day with […]