For a judgment owner, debtors filing for bankruptcy is most often bad news. If your debtor recently filed for bankruptcy, however seems to really be rich, or has concealed certain assets; in some circumstances it can make sense to do a little more research; just in case there are certain discoverable leads to potential recent and current documents showing the debtor's complete assets and income. asset info might be interesting to the debtor's bankruptcy trustee.
Chapter Seven bankruptcy is the example in my article. My articles are my opinions and are not, a legal opinion. I'm a judgment expert, and not a lawyer. When you ever need legal advice or a strategy to use, please contact a lawyer who knows bankruptcy law.
A 2004 Creditor's exam might be the way of finding more information related to any available assets your debtor put on their schedules, and may help you find undeclared and/or significantly undervalued available assets. Everything depends on you finding such available assets, and verifying that the judgment debtor has has not listed their assets properly. Examples might be when your judgment debtor documents some really valuable things as being worth $150 as "furniture miscellaneous" on their bankruptcy's financial schedule.
If discovery is to be performed on a bankrupt judgment debtor and/or the debtor's available assets; the only goal is to discover ample proof showing assets not getting listed, or getting severely underestimated in the debtor's bankruptcy's assets schedules. When such evidence is discovered, a judgment owner or their attorney might be able to bring this to the debtor's trustee's attention, and/or might be able to schedule a hearing for a motion.
After a judgment owner catches their judgment debtor lying about disclosing their assets to the court, the creditor's lawyer might have the ability to challenge any further orders that court makes which allows the judgment debtor to change their bankruptcy schedules.
In bankruptcy court, the playing "cards" are most often stacked in the debtor's favor. With certain cases, the debtor can choose any place within the USA to declare bankruptcy; even if only to make it more difficult for judgment owners. If you want to change your side's odds in a bankruptcy situation, the situation needs to be right; and you or your lawyer must do a lot of work, to attempt to move the odds to your favor.
When it is a fairly large judgment, and there appears to be a route to some available assets; it's worth performing a bit of discovery. The best results often require you to spend time organizing and gathering whatever you already know, or can quickly discover more information concerning your debtor; and (e.g.) then hiring a PI and then an attorney.
If you have a big with a lead to concealed available assets; you'll need information and documents that prove the assets actually should be part of their bankruptcy estate, and most often is a benefit to all secured creditors. Think about retaining a lawyer and check out PACER, the unique information portal to all bankruptcy-related and federal judgment info.
PACER is free for low volume customers, however you must pre-register an account with them. Think about saving all important documents as PDFs (on a Macintosh, you might have to change the file extension to .pdf), and save the PDFs and at least screen shots of important status reports, in some file folder. After you have registered with PACER, you may check there as often as you wish. Court-related matters usually move very slowly.
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