Northern California Bankruptcy Lawyer
On The Bankruptcy Soapbox
Your bankruptcy case is filed. It’s not going as smoothly as you expected.
In fact, you’re worried you’re going under.
Can you change bankruptcy lawyers after your case is filed?
Certainly, you can always fire your lawyer. It may be disruptive. It will certainly cost more money.
To decide you need to know how big are the stakes? Are your worries real?
How do you know if you need a new lawyer? [Read more…]
Three things will get you ejected from my bankruptcy office.
Three qualities simply disqualify prospects who want me to be their bankruptcy lawyer.
So what would make a bankruptcy specialist turn down work?
That is, other than the prospect who is blatantly dishonest.
See if you recognize yourself in any of these profiles.
This week’s story was even worse. The call came at 3 p.m. and the foreclosure was set for 11 a.m. the next day. Not even 24 hours to work.
And there was more than a half a million dollars in equity in the property, as the caller told the story. [Read more…]
It’s happened again: there’s an email in Monday morning’s inbox from a client whom I first met weeks ago.
He tells me they want to file before Wednesday’s mediation in state court! I have no creditor information, representation agreement, money, or credit counseling certificate.
Just as inconvenient, I’m not sure I have staff who can drop everything (related to clients who planned ahead and played by our rules) to make this happen.
Clearly I’m not communicating to clients what is involved in getting even a skeleton petition on file. Lots of clients seem to think that I may be able to file the petition without any involvement on their part beyond providing info and money.
Wrong.
The bankruptcy paperwork is filed with both the client’s signature and my signature We are both attesting to the accuracy of the information and the debtor’s eligibility for bankruptcy relief.
The full filing is even more information intense: budgets looking forward and backward; recent financial history; intentions with respect to secured debts. All of it is doable, just not with a snap of the fingers.
Got to go: got a skeleton to assemble before Wednesday.
Image courtesy of Jonathan Bliss and Flickr.
No matter how much they’ve spent on other stuff, those shopping for a bankruptcy lawyer seem to expect a free consultation.
“Everyone else offers a free consultation” I’m told.
Not me: I don’t do “free”.
But I’ve come to doubt what other bankruptcy attorneys offer is really a free consultation.
Oh, it may be free, but is it a consultation?
A client came to me recently after a free consultation with another bankruptcy lawyer. I was interested in what had occurred that the client and attorney didn’t bond. I probed.
Come to find out, the free “consultation” was 15 minutes long and the client was instructed to bring no documents!
In my book, that’s not a consultation, that’s a hand shake and a sales pitch.
Others who have hired me reported that their first meeting with a previous lawyer was really a meeting with a paralegal.
So maybe what other attorneys have been giving away isn’t really free legal advice but marketing.
Bankruptcy involves the sweep of your life:
I have trouble getting that information, analyzing it, and making recommendations to the client in less than an hour, and often two hours. And documents are required.
Just as I need to explore the client’s situation, the client needs to learn about how bankruptcy works, whether there are alternatives, and what I will expect from them. [Read more…]
Professionally, what’s a bankruptcy lawyer thankful for?
On a less lofty note, I’m thankful for computers and the internet, which make it possible to represent individuals without carbon paper, adding machines, trips to the clerk’s office, and stacks of books in a library.
I’m thankful as a woman to live in a time and place where my gender isn’t a bar to education and professional contribution.
And, at every level of my being, I’m thankful for a wonderful set of bankruptcy lawyers I count as friends and partners, who share generously and stretch my thinking.
Image courtesy of Pixabay, for whom I am more and more thankful.
I had my fees cut last week in a small Chapter 13 case. The cut ($500) wasn’t large in absolute terms.
But the wound is deep and will continue to bleed into my attitude about what I do as a professional.
To borrow a phrase from my kids, I feel profoundly disrespected.
The case, filed by another lawyer, had been targeted for dismissal. It had lingered unconfirmed for many, many months and the initial attorney was leaving bankruptcy practice.
Unlike many bankruptcy lawyers, I’m willing to come into a case mid stream and try to salvage a bad situation. I hate to see clients take a hit traceable to poor representation.
In this case, I subbed in, found some mistakes that, once corrected, allowed confirmation, and sought to be paid for the work.
The result in the case, I thought, was stellar.
The judge’s issue with my fee application was the relative size of fees incurred to prepare a separate, customized fee application, draft a notice, and appear at a hearing 15 miles from my office requiring travel during rush hour.
The court has a “guideline” that the preparation of the fee application should cost no more than 5% of the fees sought. That works if the fees are $10,000 or more. The rule was probably crafted with Chapter 11 reorganization cases in mind.
When the fees are a couple of thousand dollars, 5% becomes an impossibly small number relative to the tasks required. [Read more…]
Lawyers become lawyers, in large part, because they can’t, or don’t want to, do math.
Judges are lawyers who got promoted.
And therein is the root of the problem with “no look” attorneys fee for consumer bankruptcy cases.
Judges don’t understand mathematics. They expect the “law” of averages to result in fair compensation for debtor’s lawyers, relieving judges of having to consider and approve an appropriate fee case by case.
Only the law of averages doesn’t work on small numbers: small numbers like the number of cases a consumer lawyer handles in a year.
The Bankruptcy Code empowers judges to review the debtor’s financial transactions with his attorney. [Read more…]
Peter Mullison proposes in a recent article, that there are five types of people one should talk to about financial problems:
If one is undecided about whether bankruptcy is appropriate in their situation, he suggests they should elicit the advice of the above parties.
While I understand the sincere sentiment in undertaking that path, it is potentially very dangerous.
While I’m all for getting support and feedback from those close to me, unless they’ve gone through a bankruptcy or had the same issues (and even if they have), the first person I would talk to about my financial problems would either be my accountant or a bankruptcy attorney.
If I was still undecided, I would then talk to another accountant or bankruptcy attorney (the famous “2nd opinion”).
The biggest issue with talking to others about things they know nothing about is you’re going to potentially get very bad advice.
There isn’t a week that has gone by in my 22+ years of practicing bankruptcy law that a potential client doesn’t tell me that they talked to someone in the past or present who told them they couldn’t file a bankruptcy, or that bankruptcy would destroy their life, they would lose everything they own, their credit would be “destroyed”, etc.
Or, there’s the opposite end of the spectrum where they hear from someone that they can file bankruptcy for $500 and wipe out everything and there are no consequences because that’s what Betty’s son Bam-Bam did after he assaulted someone with his club.
Usually the non-professional’s assessment of their options is completely wrong.
Everyone’s situation is different and bankruptcy is very complex.
You can’t just rely on what your friend’s cousin’s stepfather did in a bankruptcy case as being how yours would go (positively or negatively).
For you South Park fans, this isn’t the time to ask yourself: “I wonder what Brian Boitano would do.”
This isn’t a lot different than making a decision about whether to see a doctor or whether to follow a doctor’s advice.
A personal story comes to mind from a relative of mine who had prostate cancer. Several doctors he went to said the only thing he could do that would work is have a radical prostatectomy and remove the whole thing (which has all kinds of permanent side effects).
Said relative wasn’t sure that’s what he wanted, so he persisted until he found a doctor that said they could do localized radiation and it would work just fine.
After researching that option further, he opted for that solution and it worked fine, with no side effects, and 25 years later he is still cancer-free. I know he used his wife and friends for support and perhaps to even weigh the options provided by his different doctors, but it was the professional’s advice that governed his decision making process.
This may be precisely what Mr. Mullison meant in his article, but it wasn’t entirely clear.
My point is this: I agree with Mr. Mullison that it is important to share your issues and concerns with those close to you–particularly your spouse (in fact, in California at least, there is a duty to inform the spouse if one is going to file bankruptcy because it affects both spouses).
But the decision on what to do about these problems ultimately should be made with advice from professionals.
Image courtesy of solo_with_others
Mark Markus has been practicing exclusively bankruptcy law in California since 1991. He is a Certified Specialist in Bankruptcy Law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization, AV-Rated by martindale.com, and A+ rated by the Better Business Bureau. His webpage is www.bklaw.com
I applaud attorneys who make sound information about bankruptcy available to the public. My only requirement is that their information be true.
The truth is income taxes are dischargeable in bankruptcy if 3 reasonably simple conditions are met; debts to the government are generally dischargeable in bankruptcy.
Please reread that line, and get that bit of law in your head.
Because you wouldn’t know the truth of the statement above from reading the blog of this lawyer (who puts himself forward as an expert on bankruptcy law) whose opening line is utterly and absolutely wrong on the law.
Is Vincent Howard of Orange County really giving this information out to his clients? I surely hope not. [Read more…]
The client with a pending foreclosure sale called and canceled an initial consultation with me last week. He wanted to “think about it” before coming in. If I had been the one taking the call, I would have gone ballistic. (Can we still say that after the Tucson shootings?).
Gathering information about bankruptcy does not commit one to filing. There is such a lot of bad information out there about bankruptcy, not to mention the information that might have been good once, but is outdated post bankruptcy “reform”.
Reliable information is neutral. It is, itself, painless. Clients can make themselves feel as badly about filing bankruptcy as they choose, but the pain is largely self inflicted.
Money issues come with so much emotional baggage. My pitch to clients is to look at their financial options as purely a business issuee.
So many clients come in, full of bankruptcy myths, misunderstandings, and “research” from which they’ve drawn erroneous conclusions.
My fear for the guy facing the foreclosure sale was that he might conclude that he was willing to let the property go, and not consider the significant adverse tax consequences that a foreclosure outside of bankruptcy might trigger. “Thinking about it” without solid information to contemplate is pointless.
Arghhhhh!
Image courtesy of jcfischer
