News Topic: ATexasBankruptcyLawyersBlog

 One of the benefits of holding property or doing business through a limited liability company is that "entry of a charging order is the exclusive remedy by which a judgment creditor of a member or of any other owner of a membership interest may ... Read full article

Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has played a variety of roles in her legal career. She has been a public defender, an attorney in private practice, a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a U.S. District Judge and a Court of Appeals ... Read full article

Bankruptcy has been likened to a class action. In a typical class action, a class representative files suit against a defendant seeking relief on behalf of a class of plaintiff. If class certification is not granted, the suit continues as a conventional ... Read full article

 In a case involving multiple parties and proceedings, the Fifth Circuit has affirmed lower court rulings which prohibited one non-debtor from suing a second non-debtor and awarded sanctions against a party that told a state court to disregard the ... Read full article

While bankruptcy subject matter jurisdiction is broad, sometimes an order can just go too far as shown by the recent opinion from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Patterson v. Mahway Bergen  Retail Group, Inc. , 2022 U.S. ... Read full article

A new opinion from the Fifth Circuit shows multiple mishaps in connection with a bankruptcy-related auction. However, its most important holding has to do with authenticating evidence. The bottom line is that a trial court decision limiting a defaulting ... Read full article

Consider the following hypothetical: Assume that I wrote a story about a restaurant patron from Oklahoma who filed a claim in the case of a Texas restaurant claiming that he got food poisoning from eating a batch of bad French fries. In the course of ... Read full article

 By now, we have grown used to Zoom hearings, Zoom mediations and Zoom depositions. However, a case I heard discussed at the ABI Winter Leadership Conference points out that as ubiquitous as these technologically assisted interactions are, they can pose ... Read full article

 Judge Michael Parker was sworn in as the newest Bankruptcy Judge in the Western District of Texas on November 1, 2021. He was a law clerk to Judge Ronald B. King, the judge who he replaced and practiced in San Antonio with Norton Rose Fulbright for many ... Read full article

Knowing when to answer a lawsuit is important to avoid a default judgment. However, different types of courts have different rules for how to serve a complaint and when the answer is due. While I have long known about the rule for Texas state courts, I ... Read full article

I. Filing the Claim  ... Read full article

 Recently I wrote about a Fifth Circuit case where a creditor tried to escape the terms of a confirmed plan in a subsequent case. Now the Court has written an opinion about a debtor that tried to do the same thing. Fortunately the result was the same in ... Read full article

Third party releases are a controversial topic with Congress considering legislation to ban them. However, Judge Greg Costa, writing for the Fifth Circuit, has distinguished between an impermissible third-party release and a plan provision reducing a ... Read full article

Summary judgment was intended to be a method of disposing of cases where there are not any disputed issues for the court to trial. Sometimes it seems that summary judgment is a way to get rid of cases that the court doesn't want to try. In a new ... Read full article

Many consumer debtor attorneys have chosen to enhance their revenue by filing suit on relatively minor violations of the automatic stay or discharge. There is nothing inherently wrong with these suits since they vindicate the rights that debtors receive ... Read full article

Federal court practitioners, particularly those appearing in bankruptcy court, are familiar with the requirements of the lodestar method for proving up attorneys' fees. Under Johnson v. Georgia Highway Express, Inc. , 488 F.2d 714 (5th Cir. 1974) and ... Read full article

  “One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small….” — “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane ... Read full article

The National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges has put out a statement on Inclusive Language which recommends using the term  "firewall," "screen" or "ethics wall" instead of "Chinese wall" to describe "an ... Read full article