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

Fort Worth bankruptcy attorney Reed Allmand has a great post up about how to tell if your bankruptcy attorney is a lemon. Reed’s top five tipoffs:

1. The attorney has an exclusively on-line presence and you have never met him or her in person. (Note: some disagree with this, and think on-line only lawyering is the wave of the future).

2. Weeks have gone by and the bankruptcy attorney has not filed your petition with the court. Always a bad sign.

3. The bankruptcy attorney is unable to answer your questions about the process, or to refer you to a source with the answers. I would add to this an unwillingness to research the answer if not known. No one knows everything, but a decent attorney should have a basic idea about where your answer lies.

4. The bankruptcy attorney lets staff give out legal advice. Reed says: run the other way!

5. The bankruptcy attorney has a bad reputation in the community. Not the easiest thing for you to smoke out, but lots of negative opinions are worth at least a red flag.

By Doug Beaton

When you file for bankruptcy, you need to list all of the lawsuits that you are involved in, or have been involved in for the past year.

Typically, this will involve listing one or several collection cases that have been filed against you in local forums such as the Lawrence District Court.

But it also means listing lawsuits that you have against others, including actual claims that have been filed in court, and potential claims that could be filed in court in the future.

If you “forget” to tell your bankruptcy attorney about these other claims, bad things can happen — to you and your expected windfall. For example, your own personal injury lawyer, hired on contingency, could find out about the bankruptcy case and become (rightfully) reluctant to forward your share of the settlement. Instead, he might contact the bankruptcy trustee directly and ask what he should do. Chances are, the trustee will re-open the case and accept the settlement, and distribute it to the unsecured creditors. The PI lawyer still gets paid, its just the settlement money that gets re-routed. This recently happened in Orlando, Fla.

Or take a look at this case from Los Angeles: there, a local court dismissed outright a lawsuit that wasn’t listed on the plaintiff’s bankruptcy petition, calling it a case of “judicial estoppel.”

In laymen’s terms, judicial estoppel means you cannot take inconsistent positions in different judicial proceedings. You cannot tell the bankruptcy court you have no claims and then assert a claim in civil court soon thereafter. In this case, the court dismissed a lawsuit because the plaintiff’s recent bankruptcy asserted that the debtor had no claims or reasons to sue anyone.

So if you are going to file for bankruptcy, take a minute and do it right; let your bankruptcy lawyer know about any potential lawsuits you have so they can be declared properly. That way you probably will get to keep at least part of the settlement.

By Doug Beaton

Schedule G of your bankruptcy petition is the place for declaring your executory contracts.

Say what?

You are not alone in wondering what the term “executory contracts” means, as it is seldom used in any other area of the law outside the bankruptcy code.

Fortunately, the answer is really not too complicated — an executory contract is one where one (or both) of the parties have not competed their obligations.

The best example is a lease. Until the lease runs out, it’s an executory contract, because the landlord still has to provide access to the leased property.

Schedule G becomes very useful for debtors who are filing bankruptcy cases where they want or need to get out of a burdensome apartment lease. Whether it’s a vermin filled unit or just a too high rent you can’t afford anymore, listing the lease on schedule G will allow you to break it as part of a typical Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

This comes in handy in this area, where many people in areas like Haverhill, Methuen or Lawrence have leases in two or three family houses that they would like to terminate.

The form itself is simple to fill out: name and address of the landlord, along with the terms of the lease are what must be declared.

Schedule G isn’t limited to housing leases, though. Consumers who have rent-to-own contracts, book club deals, cell phone contracts that have gotten out of hand, or fitness club memberships that they no longer use can all take advantage of Schedule G to shed themselves of these burdens when they file for bankruptcy. Car leases too.

If you live in the Merrimack Valley and have any of these contracts and are thinking about filing for bankruptcy, let your bankruptcy lawyer know about them, and chances are you can get rid of more problems than you expected if you decide to file a Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy case.

By Doug Beaton