The CARES Act, Public Law 116-136 had amended several parts of the Bankruptcy Code, but included sunset provisions terminating March 27, 2021. The COVID-19 Bankruptcy Relief Extension Act of 2021, H.R.1651, passed by the House and Senate and signed by the President on March 27, 2021, extended some provisions for another year. Section 1113 of the CARES Act had amended...

By Professor Nancy Rapoport Dear Readers: The ConsiderChapter13.org staff has, once again, raised an important ethics issue: how far does the attorney-client privilege go? In Taylor Lohmeyer Law Firm v. United States,1 the Fifth Circuit had to wrestle with that issue after the law firm (Taylor Lohmeyer) claimed a blanket attorney-client privilege for all documents that were subject to the...

By Herbert L. Beskin, Chapter 13 Trustee for the Western District of Virginia (Charlottesville) *Special thanks to Gretchen D. Holland for editing this article. Facts In Vieira v. Gaither (In re Gaither), Bankr. D. S.C., # 18-01317-dd, Adv. Pro. 18 80040-dd, Chapter 7 case; 11/30/18 opinion (Duncan); 2018 Bankr. LEXIS 3816, the Debtors’ son died in an aviation accident in...

Remember Mort. Corp. of the South v. Bozeman (In re Bozeman), 57 F. 4th 895 (11th Cir. 2023)? That was the recent 11th Circuit case previously reviewed by Lawrence Ahern on this site. It was the Chapter 13 version of The Perfect Storm.  The Debtor proposed to pay the principal balance of her mortgage ($17 . . . It looks...

On June 6, the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in Siegel v. Fitzgerald1 held that the increase in U.S. Trustee fees in Chapter 11 cases violated the uniformity requirement of the Constitution’s Bankruptcy Clause,2 because the fee increase in 2017 only applied to in the U.S. Trustee districts and didn’t apply to the Bankruptcy Administrator districts in Alabama and North Carolina....

Although a Chapter 13 debtor has the absolute right to voluntarily dismiss her Chapter 13 case, even after a motion to convert is filed, the Court retains the rights to impose restrictions on the dismissal. (Waites) In re Brittany Frances Minogue, 2021 WL 4453589 (Bankr. D. S.C. September 29, 2021) Summary Brittany Minogue filed a voluntary petition under Chapter 13...

By Academy Staff On October 1, 2020, Jonathan W. DeLoach was appointed as a Chapter 13 Standing Trustee for the Middle District of Georgia. He inherited a razor-sharp trusteeship vacated by retiring Kristin Hurst. Jon, as he prefers to be called, received his Bachelor of Arts in History in 1988 from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a National...

By The Honorable William Houston Brown (Retired) Recordation of divorce judgment created secured claim. In Chapter 13 case, the debtor objected to former spouse’s secured claim, with pre-bankruptcy divorce judgment awarding former marital home to the husband but ordering equalization payments to the wife. No security was mentioned in the judgment, but its recordation created a lien under Wisconsin law....

By Wm. Houston Brown, United States Bankruptcy Judge (Retired) Discharge - Section 523(a)(8)(A)(ii) does not include “loan.” Denying Navient’s motion to dismiss debtors’ complaint, reviewing the split of authority on whether § 523(a)(8)(A)(ii)’s “educational benefit” included loans, and finding no controlling authority in the Tenth Circuit, the Court concluded that Congress made a distinction between “loan” in § 523(a)(8)(A)(i) and...

The Bankruptcy Code produces some difficult results. Sometimes those results pass difficult and extend into problematic. The Bankruptcy Court for the District of Idaho crossed well over difficult in In re Clifford, 2022 WL 16727279 (Bankr. D. Id. 2022). The question addressed in Clifford is one that comes up in every Chapter 13 case – how do we calculate “Current...