EVIDENCE UPDATE PART VI

Dear Readers: We’re now at the season where things go a bit wacky, and one thing that can go wacky has to do with people who are represented by counsel who want to talk with you.  “Let’s cut out the middleman,” they think. After all, what harm could it be to save time? Plenty of harm, actually:  Model Rule 4.2...

Tiffany M. Cornejo was appointed as the Chapter 13 Standing Trustee for the District of New Mexico on December 1, 2017. She took the reins from retiring Kelley Skehen. Ms. Cornejo received her Bachelor of Science in Journalism (B.S.J.) degree at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 2002 and remained there to obtain her Juris Doctor in 2005. She...

By Hon. Brian Lynch, United States Bankruptcy Judge, Western District of Washington, Tacoma Division When the Supreme Court issued United Student Aid Funds, Inc. v. Espinosa1 on March 23, 2010, commentators were perplexed.2 On the one hand, the Court upheld the 9th Circuit’s ruling allowing a hardship discharge of student loans in a chapter 13 plan. The Court held that...

By Cathy Moran, Esq. (Redwood City, CA) My Google Alert popped up a lovely win for a Chapter 13 homeowner, but all I could see was the train wreck that lies ahead. The bankruptcy court ruled that the confirmed (and completed) plan trumped a late-filed mortgage proof of claim. Payment of the amount provided in the plan cured the prepetition...

By Angela M. Scolforo, Staff Attorney to Herbert L. Beskin, Chapter 13 Trustee for the Western District of Virginia Since January 2019 alone there have been about 250 student loan discharge cases decided in the federal courts.1 One site reports that student loan debt in the United States totals $1.73 trillion, across 43.2 million borrowers, and the debt is growing6...

By Jan Hamilton, Chapter 13 Standing Trustee (Topeka, KS) I. The Plan1 A. Notions to Consider before the Plan is Filed… Time for Filing of the Plan. No later than 90 days after the filing of the case, the debtor is required to file a plan, unless the court extends the time if the “need is attributable to circumstances for...

By William Houston Brown, Adviser, Academy for Consumer Bankruptcy Education, Inc. and Lawrence R. Ahern, III, Brown and Ahern (Nashville, TN) In two February opinions, the Supreme Court addressed issues that appear in bankruptcy cases, one dealing with a common practice of entering nunc pro tunc orders and the other affecting determination of property rights under state law. In a...

By Mary Viegelahn, Chapter 13 Trustee San Antonio, Texas Although Trustee Viegelahn first produced this list for an ethics panel in 2019, it is a timely heads-up now. This list was gathered from Trustees across the country. Providing ECF credentials to an outside “firm” to allow them to file a bankruptcy for a debtor the attorney has never met or...