ACleanSlateTheBankruptcyLawBlog

A recent New York Times piece confirms a lot of what readers of A Clean Slate already know: A lot of debt settlement outfits are scams and don’t deliver anywhere close to what they advertise.

The Automatic Stay.

It is one of the greatest and most powerful provisions of the Bankruptcy Code. If sections of the Bankruptcy Code were literary characters, the Automatic Stay would be a superhero.

The Automatic Stay comes from section 362 of the Bankruptcy Code. Section 362 provides that the commencement of a bankruptcy case stays pretty much any action that creditors can take against a debtor or the debtor’s property.

So, actions to collect a debt? Stopped.

Wage garnishments? Stopped.

New York Times columnist Ron Lieber writes about student loans and bankruptcy in his Your Money column this week. Ron spotted this post from A Clean Slate about how student loans are like a tattoo and called me to chat about it. Ron happens to know me from years ago so this was a good opportunity to catch up on things.

I wrote a short article on a very nerdy commercial bankruptcy litigation issue for the American Bankruptcy Institute. The article was published in the spring newsletter of the ABI’s Bankruptcy Litigation Committee. I have received good feedback on it so I thought it might be worth sharing a link here.