Questions about debts or bankruptcy? Call Doug Beaton, a local specialist in American bankruptcy law.

Imagine you’ve been thinking of filing for bankruptcy (as well as a divorce). You’re living in a house in North Andover, but your spouse has just moved out an got an apartment in Methuen. More bad news for you right, if you have to pay for two bankruptcies instead of one?

Perhaps, but not necessarily. In many cases still-married but separated spouses can still file a bankruptcy case together even if one (or both) have moved out.

There are a few advantages to trying this.

First, you may both be able to have the same bankruptcy lawyer. This saves money right off the bat.

Second, you will pay just one attorney fee and one filing fee for the bankruptcy case.

Third, you don’t have to take the credit counseling classes together (good for those who are really having trouble being in the same room). You will, however, have to appear briefly together at the meeting of creditors after the case is filed.

Fourth, you can count both of your separate living expenses on the bankruptcy forms.

And a joint case provides a baseline for disclosing each partner’s assets.

With a joint chapter 7 bankruptcy filing, you can have a single lawyer, file one case, and get everything done with a minimum of fuss, bother and expense. Or you can do things separately. You can file two cases. Each can pay a different bankruptcy attorney. You can each pay for separate credit counseling classes and all the court costs.

Which do you think is better for you?

When you file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case in either Massachusetts or New Hampshire, at the moment of filing you have no idea who the bankruptcy trustee that will be handling your case will be.

Welcome to trustee roulette!

Different trustees have different practices, attitudes, and inclinations. All of which can affect cases in subtle ways.

Some things to watch out for are trustees who make needless threats to debtors, or who go out of their way to appear intimidating, trustees who don’t run the creditor’s meetings on time (wasting your time and mine), and trustees who make demands that debtors produce volumes of unnecessary records.

An effective bankruptcy attorney at your side will help you deal with each of these tactics should they occur (and I must say, this kind of trouble is the exception, not the rule).

Document requests can be negotiated, intimidation doesn’t work if you have a lawyer with you, and so on. As for the waiting game, that one we both have to live with when it occurs!

Bankruptcy lawyer Wendell Sherk recently wrote a nice article about what he called the “one-bite rule” in bankruptcy. Simply put, this is not a real rule, but the notion that creditors can get away with a little bit of harassment even after a bankruptcy case is filed — one last bite of the apple, so to speak, before abandoning collection efforts.

Now lets be clear that the actual bankruptcy code allows no such thing — as soon as your case is filed, creditors are prohibited from contacting you, whether by phone, mail, or any other way. But creditors may think that the damages they face for a “small” violation of the law makes one final collection attempt worth the risk.

What to do about this problem? Well, you can always sue the creditor and make them pay small damages for a “small” violation.

But here in the Massachusetts / New Hampshire / Merrimack Valley area, what I tell my bankruptcy clients to do first is very simple: ANSWER THE PHONE. As soon as your case is filed, and you have the docket number, write it down next to your phone (or enter it in your cell or PDA). Then answer the creditor calls one by one, telling each that you have filed bankruptcy case number 123456.

This method negates the one-bite problem, and you will notice the level of calls dropping much quicker than if you kept avoiding them.

If you started plucking people off the street and asking them at random what the process of filing for bankruptcy involved, you would find that most people imagine in their head a sort-of real estate closing gone berserk — piles and piles of legalese being shoved at them for the old John Hancock.

They would be mistaken, however.

A small bankruptcy case might involve signing only two pieces of paper with an actual pen.

That’s because the bankruptcy court system was one of the early adapters of an electronic document processing system. Bankruptcy courts have been functioning as paperless offices for almost a decade now. The petitions that get filed with the court are transmitted in electric form over the Internet, which makes signing the papers an anachronism — or does it?

For the most part, the system functions smoothly because the court has all the lawyers and creditors sign up for “electronic signatures,” which can be placed in to documents and substituted for ink ones. All the usual players are registered, in other words, so the system functions well from that perspective.

But what about the debtors? Registration doesn’t make sense for them, since the court doesn’t know in advance who is going to file a petition, and the vast majority of debtors only have one short involvement with the bankruptcy system.

So debtors still need to put pen to ink and ink to paper at least a few times. How it is handled, however, varies from district to district.

In Massachusetts, a debtor needs to sign the third page of the bankruptcy petition in ink, as well as a “declaration of electronic filing” that essentially serves as a temporary registration to the court’s electronic filing system. These documents are scanned by your bankruptcy attorney, and will be filed in electronic form along with the rest of the paperwork.

In New Hampshire, signing the petition itself is advisable, but a longer and more all-purpose version of the “declaration of electronic filing is in use, and must be signed above all. This declaration is then given to your attorney, who snail-mails it to the court — meaning the bankruptcy court in New Hampshire isn’t 100% paperless after all!