EXPERIENCE
It’s hard for people who aren’t lawyers to know what a lawyer can do for them. Phrases like “Adversarial Actions” and “Post Discharge Violations” aren’t part of most peoples everyday speech. While I can’t talk about everything that it’s possible for us to do for you, what I want to do here is give you a general idea of what’s possible.
In your specific situation, with your specific facts, we may be able to help you in ways that we can’t mention here.
Each section is just a brief overview, and has a link to a page where we go into more depth about the specific subject if you’re interested in a bit more detail.
- Bankruptcy Planning and Filing
This is the heart of bankruptcy, we prepare and file Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 petitions for our clients. More importantly we help our clients plan for filing them, by appropriately arranging their assets and property to help them keep as much as allowed.
- Tax Settlement / Offers in Compromise
We negotiate with the IRS and Franchise Tax board to achieve your goals. This generally consists of two parts. First, we help our clients prepare a plan to successfully meet their tax obligations in the future. Second, we meet with the taxation authorities to reach an agreement to reduce the back amount owed and a payment schedule that they can reach while still going forward with their lives. Offers in Compromise are one way to formally reduce the amount owed, but are not our only option.
- Garnishment Removal
Often a creditor will either get a court order or other method to garnish your paycheck or other cash source. We help our clients get that cash flow going back to them.
- Lien Removal
Sometimes after a bankruptcy a person’s personal debt will be wiped out, but their creditors will still have a lien on their house. For certain classes of liens, when the underlying facts are in your favor, you can have these liens either partially or completely removed. We’ve helped people remove hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of liens from their homes and property.
- Adversarial Actions / Bankruptcy Litigation
Most of the time the bankruptcy process goes smoothly and efficiently, but sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t people can find themselves litigating in the bankruptcy court. This can be about the bankruptcy, for instance someone can claim that a particular debt shouldn’t be discharged or that you shouldn’t get your bankruptcy at all. Sometimes it’s because a case gets pulled into a bankruptcy because one of the parties went bankrupt during the case. Many attorneys aren’t familiar with litigating in the bankruptcy court, but we are, we have, and we can do it for you.
- Post Bankruptcy Relief
Nothing in the world is perfect, sometimes a bankruptcy will have a problem with it, or something should have shown up that didn’t. We can help correct problems with a closed bankruptcy by re-opening them and listing debts that were neglected, disclosing assets that were forgotten about, or correcting other issues.
- General Litigation
This is just what it sounds like, getting your case ready and going to court. While we often work with the Bankruptcy system, it’s not a one size fits all solution. We look at your problems and your whole life to see if it makes more sense to do something else. We’ve litigated both multi-million dollar business disputes and old credit card debt collectors when that’s the proper response. Our experience litigating outside the bankruptcy court is what’s made us so prepared to litigate inside it.
- Post Discharge Violations
Just because you’ve gotten your bankruptcy discharge doesn’t mean that debt collectors are going to leave you alone. Sometimes they’re contacting you by mistake and sometimes they just don’t care about breaking the law. We’ll help you in either case. We’ll show them they need to stop if they’re trying to collect innocently, and if they just don’t care about breaking the law we’ll pull them right into the bankruptcy court and make them regret it with fines, penalties, and attorney fees.