Last week I was at the Oakland Bankruptcy Court for a plan confirmation hearing calendar. Unlike a confirmation calendar I’d attended in another judge’s courtroom a few weeks before, nearly all of the attorneys appearing before Judge Lafferty knew what they were doing and had actually done what was needed to be done to get their clients’ cases confirmed. It is noteworthy that I knew nearly all of them and so I knew them generally to be intelligent, capable and in fact fine attorneys. They did a great job for their clients.
What that means is that most of the chapter 13 plans were confirmed or the hearings on them were continued for a short period of time to address rather minor issues. Maybe the fact that the attorneys were actually doing their jobs was a big reason for Judge Lafferty’s rather jovial mood. He cracked a few jokes and good-naturedly poked fun at a couple attorneys.
I couldn’t help contrasting this with the weird mood in Judge Elaine Hammond’s courtroom two weeks ago. During another plan confirmation calendar, Judge Hammond, also a bankruptcy judge in Oakland, exhibited an enormous amount of patience and restraint as, in case after case, attorneys that I’d never seen before hemmed and hawed, stuttered and stammered, and tried to come up with cogent reasons why they hadn’t accomplished some of the most basic tasks required of bankruptcy attorneys filing chapter 13 cases in Oakland Bankruptcy Court. It was clear that many of them were new to the bankruptcy court–I’d never seen them and I’ve been practicing in Oakland since since 1999. Maybe they’d been practicing in other areas of the law before, but they were now in bankruptcy court and out of their element.
In the past I would have criticized them heavily and suggested that they leave the practice of bankruptcy law to those who know what they’re doing. Instead, I find myself thinking of San Francisco Peninsula bankruptcy attorney Cathy Moran, one of the best bankruptcy attorneys in the Bay Area, who had a pretty charitable response to the recent influx of inexperienced bankruptcy lawyers wreaking havoc in bankruptcy court and committing malpractice for their clients: She started a website to train new bankruptcy lawyers. Instead of running them out of town, she figured there were enough cases to go around and decided that she could make the bankruptcy world better by raising the level of bankruptcy practice not only in the Bay Area, but also throughout California and the entire United States. She also has a great consumer bankruptcy site loaded with information to help regular people figure out how the bankruptcy system works.
To a great extent, I think she’s succeeded. I like to read her frequent posts on important or practical bankruptcy practice topics and on more than one occasion the fear of ending up as an example of stupid lawyering on her blog has caused me to take a second and more careful look at some of my proposed bankruptcy strategies.
