You may wonder who it is who creates the bankruptcy forms that we fill out. In 1922, the United States Congress established the “Conference of Senior Court Judges” – now called the “Judicial Conference of the United States” – to make policy and establish procedures for the operation of federal courts in the United States. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is the presiding officer of the Judicial Conference.
Periodically the Judicial Conference modifies the official bankruptcy forms. The forms underwent a fairly substantial revision in October, 2005, on the effective date of the new bankruptcy law.
With the new law almost a year old, the Judicial Conference is about to modify the forms again. Most of these changes are fairly minor, but these revisions will require the software vendors who provide case managment software to bankruptcy lawyers to release new versions of their programs.
One of the biggest changes I see has to do with reaffirmation agreements – what used to be a one or two page document now is now a 10 page document that requires both the debtor and the lawyer (with associated liability) to verify that the reaffirmation is in the best interest of the debtor.
In any case, these new forms will go into effect on October 1, 2006.