One of the greatest misconceptions that anyone can continue to foster about bankruptcy is that it somehow tags you as a loafer or a ne’er-do-well. Maryland attorneys experienced in the area of bankruptcy law know that those who are considering bankruptcy, whether it is Chapter 13 or Chapter 7, usually have been thrust there by circumstances beyond their control. To obtain real debt relief and financial recovery it may help to practice some emotional detachment.
That’s a characteristic we might expect to be exercised, too, on the part of the judges in the bankruptcy courts as they consider the individual filings. At the same time, we can hope that they are not so detached from their humanity that they aren’t able to feel some level of compassion for the trials that petitioners have faced.
One recent study seems to indicate that just such empathy does exist and does get exercised by some judges on the bankruptcy court bench. How this was gauged was by presenting about a third of all the bankruptcy judges in the nation with a fictitious Chapter 13 filing by a family of four.
The same paperwork was submitted to all the judges, but half of them received documents that included an added paragraph at the end in which the filers acknowledged their role in getting into trouble and that they were truly sorry. In terms of the details, the case laid out a creditor payback plan that would result in 18 percent of all unsecured debt being eliminated over three years.
It should be noted here that there are no provisions in the code for whether or how judges should deal with such an apology, and many attorneys tend to discourage them. But when researchers got the rulings back, they found that 40.6 percent of the judges who were privy to the apology approved the plan. That compared to 34.4 percent who approved the plan without the apology.
The authors conclude that while the results are significant statistically, they do seem to reveal that many judges allow themselves to apply more than just the letter of the law when making their decisions. They can and do accept that filers are well meaning.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, “Do Apologies Matter in Bankruptcy?,” Katy Stech, Feb. 15, 2013