By Robert (Bob) Schuman, Owner/Managing Broker, Network Financial Group I’m a mortgage broker. In that role, I see close up the immense relief that a homeowner feels when they file Chapter 13. They are no longer forced to deal with collection calls and a multitude of letters that are aggressive and intimidating, threatening to take their car, foreclose on their...

(Reprinted with permission: https://www.dailyjournal.com/) By M. Jonathan Hayes, Resnik Hayes, Moradi LLP (Los Angeles) I met with my best friend Jim King, consumer bankruptcy attorney extraordinaire, during the Thanksgiving break in 2014, several weeks before his untimely death. We met at his office in Glendale to do his oral history. Somewhere in there I told him he could borrow my...

By William J. Purdy, III, Simmons & Purdy (Soquel, CA) Hundreds of thousands of taxpayers in the past few weeks have looked at or at least thought about, Form 1099-A or Form 1099-C documents they have received. Some arrived in the tax year a debt was allegedly cancelled. Others are issued by financial instructions many years after they should have...

By Henry E. Hildebrand, III, Chapter 13 Standing Trustee (Nashville, TN) Introduction In 2016, the American Bankruptcy Institute’s president, Eugene Wedoff, retired bankruptcy judge from the Northern District of Illinois, proposed to the ABI Board that a commission be established to examine the current status of consumer bankruptcy laws, rules, and cases with the goal of its making general suggestions...

By Pardis Akhavan, Resnik Hayes Moradi LLP (Encino, CA) The bankruptcy court in In re Ritter, 2021 WL 864092 (Bkrtcy C.D. Cal, 2021)(J. Tighe),denied debtors’ motion for an immediate discharge under Section 1328(i) ruling that Congress apparently did not intend that a chapter 13 debtor who obtains a loan modification should also receive a discharge, on that basis alone at...

Jan M. Sensenich graduated from Windham College in Putney, Vermont in 1978 and Vermont Law School in 1983. He served as Core Faculty Member and Director of the Woodbury College Legal Clinic from 1983 to 1987and from 1990 to 1992. Jan was an Associate with Jerome I. Meyers, P.C. from 1987 to 1990 when he opened his own practice concentrating...

Most lawyers were torn between wincing and laughing when a lawyer filed a brief packed with case authority created out of whole cloth by an AI bot. Meanwhile, a segment of the bar is fretting that we will be replaced by powerful artificial intelligence. My concern, based on a couple of casual forays into AI, is not that I will...

By Henry E. Hildebrand, III, Chapter 13 Trustee (Nashville, TN) One of the principle goals of a consumer that chooses to file bankruptcy is to obtain a discharge under § 524. Despite its importance, however, there is much more legal discussion on the logistics and the process of automatic stay under § 362 that is in existence during the pendency...