Be an advocate-your client has enough opponents. It’s no accident that the word for lawyer in Scotland, Belgium and India is advocate. If we do our jobs for bankruptcy clients well, we are advocates for their interests at every stage of the game. Yet I hear lawyers assuming that there is a known and pat […]
New Kid On The SoCal Bankruptcy Block
I’m deviating from the usual here to cheer on my friend and partner in the adventure that is Bankruptcy Mastery, Jay Fleischman. Yesterday I presented him for swearing in to the California Bar yesterday, some 17 years after he took the New York Bar. Personally, I’m not sure I could muster the energy and the […]
On Pricing The Consumer Bankruptcy Case And Involuntary Pro Bono Work
You probably spend hours in service of your client without compensation. At least, that’s how the majority of consumer bankruptcy lawyers operate. Is this the only way to practice? It seems as if the consumer debtor bankruptcy bar has been brought up to believe that we should expect no payment from our clients once […]
How To View Preferences Through The Lens Of A Chapter 13
Chapter 13 is often the chapter of choice when the client’s financial past includes avoidable transfers. Most clients are intent that the news of their bankruptcy not spread and especially horrified at the prospect of a Chapter 7 trustee suing their family members to recover preferences. At bottom, who really cares if a trustee avoids […]
Documents Be Damned
Contrary evidence can trump the pre printed form. I saw it in a case I uncovered in updating the Complete Guide to Means Testing for the NACBA Fall Workshop. Swartzentruber ( 2009 WL 28730003 (Bankr. N.D. Ohio 2009)) dealt with means testing and the classification of debts as consumer or non consumer. The debtors there […]
Fifty Shades of Summer at Mastery
Summertime.….another Gershwin song. Maybe the living is easy, and maybe not. Bankruptcy is a challenging way to make a living. Two summers ago, when this publication and lots of bankruptcy lawyers were new, we proposed a summer reading list of Supreme Court cases that you should know by name and holding. The focus was on, […]
George Gershwin Does Bankruptcy
Cases keep getting referred to my office when the clients are over the debt limits for Chapter 13. (Debt limits are less of a barrier since the debt limit moved to $2.75 M in 2022). The assumption seems to be that if the debt is that large, a Chapter 11 is required. It ain’t necessarily […]
