If you read this blog and other consumer bankruptcy blogs like Scott Riddle’s Georgia Bankruptcy blog or the Bankruptcy Law Network blog, you know that preparing for filing a case involves a great deal of effort on your part to collect information and documents. Are there any steps that you as the potential bankruptcy debtor can take to speed up the process and to keep costs down.
My Bankruptcy Law Network colleague, Michael Doan, has posted a very useful article about the timing of filing. Specifically, Michael points out that if you start the bankruptcy information gathering process towards the end of a month, and the process rolls over to the next month, then a lot of the work has to be redone. For example, the six month medican income test look back would involve a new six month period, your credit counseling certificate validity date may run out and the required tax return might change. I encourage you to take a look at Michael’s well thought out post entitled “File by the End of the Month or Start Over.”
I think that in a big picture sense, what Michael is saying is that you need to communicate regularly and accurately with your lawyer. If you meet with your lawyer on the 20th of the month and promise to have all necessary documentation by the 27th, but you end up rescheduling your appointment to the 5th of the following month, don’t be surprised if you have to pay a higher fee to account for all the new calculations.
In my practice, I do not start the time consuming process of analyzing pay stubs and figuring out the median income and/or means test until I have pretty much all of the required documentation. This means that I can’t give my client bottom line numbers unless and until my client provides me with pay stubs and tax returns. I can still give a “big picture” analysis based on my experience, but the actual number crunching has to wait. This is a major shift from pre-BAPCPA practice where I could run numbers almost immediately.
Some of my colleagues are more willing to tolerate the risk of not getting documentation in time and they end up running their calculations two or three times. If you are a lawyer and this is how you have set up your practice, I would advise you to keep your notes so at least your’ll have a head start on the calculations.