Last month I wrote a post about problems I had been having accessing the Bankruptcy Court’s ECF system and a workaround to solve that problem.  In that post I spoke about a problem that arises when your browser sees the ECF bankruptcy pleading filing screen as a disallowed pop-up, thereby leaving you with a blank [...]

In Santulli v. Texas Board of Law Examiners, 2009 WL 961568 (Tex.App.-Austin, April 10, 2009), the Texas Court of Appeals upheld the revocation of a lawyer’s license to practice law, based upon his failure to either make payment arrangements for his outstanding debts or discharge them in bankruptcy. 
The Board of Law Examiners had found that [...]

I am writing this post for the benefit of fellow lawyers and other colleagues who may be having the same problems I have accessing bankruptcy court records electronically.  If you use Firefox (Mozilla) or Opera as your browser, you will notice that your browser software periodically updates, and sometimes those updates create unintended consequences.  Similarly, [...]

An attorney can limit her appearance in a bankruptcy case to a particular contested matter or adversary proceeding in Massachusetts, without generally appearing on behalf of a debtor for all contested matters, if the client agrees and either (1) the client is otherwise pro se (case filed without an attorney) and the attorney is working [...]

Bankruptcy filers must provide paycheck information (”pay advice”) to a trustee covering the 60 days before a filing, and also must provide their attorneys with income information for the six months before a filing (including gross pay and often detailed paycheck deductions) for means test calculations.  An uncooperative former employer makes this difficult.
Employment may have [...]

Under the old laws, Chapter 13 payments were not that difficult to figure out.  Reasonable monthly expenses were subtracted from monthly net income to arrive at a monthly disposable income figure, which then gets paid for 36 to 60 months, paying off secured, priority, and unsecured claims to the extent possible.  Under BAPCPA laws passed [...]

Bankruptcy Law Network Co-Founder and President Jay S. Fleischman has joined the faculty of Solo Practice University.  He will teach a six-session online course consumer bankruptcy law.
Solo Practice University™ is a new web-based educational community to teach lawyers what they don’t learn in law school about practicing law as solo practitioners.
Fleischman is a Brooklyn, New [...]

Every federal district court has a standing order of reference which refers all bankruptcy cases to the bankruptcy court for its district.  The reference can be withdrawn by the district court at any time, usually because a case requires resolution of a conflict between bankruptcy laws and other laws affecting interstate commerce.
These local standing orders [...]

Recently I received form letters from a law firm representing HSBC Bank Nevada for Best Buy.  The letters stated: “Please be advised that our client holds a purchase money security interest in consumer goods in regards to the above-referenced claim.”  It then has three options: (1) Debtor will reaffirm; (2) Debtor will make a cash [...]

People seek bankruptcy relief in times of personal financial crisis.  Now, we are all facing a national financial crisis.  As 2009 starts, I have asked myself, “What can I do about this?”   Just asking this question, I have discovered, raises the bar for my own expectations and possibilities. As a consumer bankruptcy attorney, I help people [...]