OK, it’s summer.  Our minds wander. We wish we were at the beach. So, fritter away some more time. How about picking out your firm’s theme song? If My Practice Had a Theme Song Clients, inattentive and ungrateful, have plagued my practice lately. Purely for internal consumption, our staff theme song would be the Gilbert […]

It was community property that garnered me my first hug from Doug Jacobs. Or rather, it was the absence of community property that did it. Confusion in custody determination and acquisitions is a common scene here. You see, Doug had described his dilemma with his case involving an elderly couple who had a home with […]

When faced with a disputed lien strip, don’t discount the possibility of compromise. I wrote last time about the seeming impossibility of compromising a §707(b)(3) action.  Next to that, lien strips are easy. Yet I see attorneys all around me folding the moment a secured creditor contests a motion to value.  What opportunities squandered. Having […]

Usually my posts here have a message or a lesson imbedded. This one doesn’t, unless readers can help me find it. But it was a prickly case that resolved well, for unanticipated reasons.  Perhaps, there’s a lesson lurking somewhere here. The clients were well above median income:  a high tech engineer and a stay at […]

What’s a Chapter 13 pot plan, you ask. Not one drafted while under the influence, for sure. A “pot plan” is the contrast to a “percentage plan“. They are alternative ways to summarize the measure of what the debtor in a Chapter 13 plan proposes to pay into the plan. A percentage plan reads something […]

When an inexperienced Chapter 13 practitioner asks how much a plan has to propose to pay, I envision the Carnac the Magnificent routine from the Johnny Carson show. Carnak, in turban and robes, puts the sealed envelope with the question to his forehead, provides an answer, then opens the envelope to read the question.  The […]

Any parent who’s lived through the terrible 2’s  knows the appeal, and the annoyance, of the question “why”. Life, to a two year old, is a series of interconnected questions. Why are things this way?  Why? The centrality of that question to bankruptcy lawyers surprised me this weekend when Jay Fleischman and I conducted a […]