The critical bankruptcy attorney skill I added to my tool box came late in my bankruptcy career. It wasn’t plotting the course of a case, manipulating the means test, or success in the courtroom. It was much simpler: the willingness to answer a client question: “I don’t know but I’ll find out“.
Clients come to us stressed, uncertain, and frightened of a legal system they see as the great unknown.
They’re grasping for assurance and visiblity into their future if they take this huge step of shedding their debt. As professionals, there’s huge internal pressure to provide concrete assurances about how this all works out.
Yet, some questions may involve fact patterns or aspects of bankruptcy law we simply haven’t confronted. Or the approach of the other players in the bankruptcy game may be unknown.
Danger lies in giving in the templation to be all-knowing or overly confidence-inducing. Our early interactions with clients are all about building expectations about how a bankruptcy case will work out.
It’s a lot harder and perhaps more corrosive to the attorney-client relationship to have to revisit expectations that you have fostered and then must amend or discard as you learn more or dig into the law.
It wasn’t until I was very long in the practice that it became comfortable to confess my ignorance about the nuances of a client question. Yet it turned out to be liberating to be candid. And I have never experienced a client who reacted negatively to my confession: I don’t know, but I’ll find out. Add it to your box of bankruptcy attorney skills and see.
The equally powerful corollary
Some client questions require a less settling pronouncement: there’s no way of knowing for sure.
In the real world, we encounter lots of situations where we can’t predict with certainty how an issue will play out
- Will the trustee challenge our valuation
- Will a creditor seek non dischargeability
- Will others be swept up in our bankruptcy case
- Will the means test be questioned
Clients need to hear at the front end what issues you’ve spotted but can’t promise how they play out. At the end of the day, the client needs to be aware of risks and the range of possible outcomes. You want to cut off the end-of -case accusation that “you didn’t tell me.”
And for me, when faced with the unknowable, I turn to Chapter 13, where the right to dismiss a case that takes a negative turn is imbedded in the statute.
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