He went to an attorney in Manhattan to stop the foreclosure sale of an investment property in Brooklyn. The attorney filed a chapter 13 case, failing to recognize that the client did not quilify for chapter 13 (owning three properties, his total mortgages exceeced the secured debt ceiling for chapter 13). As a result, the bankruptcy case was dismissed and the client lost the benefit of the automatic stay, which had stopped the foreclosure.
Worse, because he had one pending bankruptcy case pending with the past year, if I filed a second case for him under chapter 11, he would now have an automatic stay that lasted only for 30 days! If he had come to me first, this problem would never have occurred.Choose the right attorney the first time.
Upon detailed analysis, I determined that a chapter 11 case would present separate risks for him, so we implemented a non-bankruptcy strategy.