State Debt Collection Laws The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) applies to debt-collection practices throughout the nation, even those that are purely intrastate in nature, and thus it essentially is a "uniform" law in eve…
Questions concerning what relief the Bankruptcy Code affords to persons seeking to discharge their government-related student loans are, in all likelihood, a common topic of discussion between most potential debtors and their bankruptcy cou…
Every day, those of us in and around the bankruptcy court face the alarming reality that during the past 10 years there has been a 96 percent increase in bankruptcy filings among those age 25 years or less. Our interactions with this age gr…
Each year since 1998, the Executive Office for U.S. Trustees (EOUST) has collected 2,000 randomly selected chapter 7 no-asset cases from across the country. All of these cases were filed, processed and closed as non-business consumer cases.…
The article "Planning for Change: Credit Counseling at the Threshold of Bankruptcy" (last month's ABI Journal) by Gordon Bermant and Ed Flynn of the EOUST elevates the dialogue about credit counseling agencies and their place in a new world…
First and foremost, bankruptcy is about people—people who have problems. They look to their lawyers and to the court for a solution to those problems. More than 95 percent of all bankruptcy cases involve consumers, not businesses or corpora…