Waukegan Bankruptcy Attorney On What An Attorney Needs To Know

As a bankruptcy attorney, you have to know a little bit about other areas of the law.  You need to know a little bit about mortgages, you need to know a little bit about auto financing, and you need to know about credit cards, loans, divorce, child support, taxes – you need to know about all these areas, and you need to do it all the time.  Someone – an attorney who does a bankruptcy here or there is going to (1) they’re not going to pick up the particular nuances of the law, and (2) if they do come across an issue, they might not come across that issue again for several years.  So when you do it all the time and you do a volume of cases, you become a better bankruptcy attorney.  In many cases, as a law firm owner, I have hired new attorneys right out of school, and it took anywhere from six months to a year before they really started to feel comfortable with bankruptcy law. 

Other times, you can bring in someone who’s been practicing for five or ten years, and you notice right away, that person knows quite a bit about bankruptcy.  They’re citing code sections, they’re citing cases, they have a history behind them, they know all the trustees, they’ve been before all the judges, and they know where all the courthouses are.  For example, we practice in five or six different counties (Cook County, Will County, Lake County, DuPage County, and Kendall County, among others).  They all have different areas where those cases go to court, where they meet with the trustee, how the trustees want the documents – everything is specialized to the point where the longer you’re doing it, the better you get at it.  And that’s just it.  When you do something all the time, you have a tendency to get pretty good at it. 

So you want to practice bankruptcy law, practice it regularly.  Don’t do a case here or there ’cause you’re going to run into problems.  Not every attorney is going to be kind enough to offer advice like I do when they call and ask a question because I’m happy to help.  But most of the attorneys, they’re busy working on their own cases, and they’re not necessarily available to help you with yours. 

But that’s basically the benefits of being a bankruptcy attorney.  You provide good advice, you provide a solution, you hold their hand, you assist them through the way, and you know what?  They’re happy about you when the – when the case is over, and they’re going to refer you to other people that they know who are struggling financially.  Especially right now, under the current economic crisis that we’re going through in this country, people are losing their homes, people are losing their jobs, and people do not have money.  So they’re going to come across someone who is struggling.  They’re going to come across a family member or a friend or a neighbor who talks to them about a lawsuit, a garnishment, a foreclosure, a bill collector that’s harassing them.  Your name is going to come up. 

They’re going to say, “You know what?  Give David M. Siegel a call.  He can help you.  He provided a solution for me.  He can provide a solution for you.  He can get you out of debt.  He can get you on a fresh start or he can get you into a payment plan that’s going to put your creditors off for three to five years while you’re repaying them.”  So it’s a great way to help people, help family members, and help neighbors.  Being a bankruptcy attorney is a great way to help people, either with Chapter 7 or Chapter 13, and I am glad that I decided to be a bankruptcy attorney, and I will never, ever regret my decision to help people get out of debt under the United States Bankruptcy Code.