I am pleased to announce Diamond Law has opened a 2nd location on the eastside of El Paso.  For about a year we had a small office on the eastside opened 2 days a week, but now we finally took the plunge and opened up a beautiful (I decorated) new office to better serve El Pasoans.  I always heard that El Paso was one of the largest cities per square mile in the country. El Paso covers  1013 square miles - all the more reason to add a second office. 

During a period of unemployment you have some serious decisions to make regarding outstanding debt.  Debt consolidation is often an option consumers may use to help manage their debt.  This includes combining outstanding loans with a new loan that pays off what was owed, leaving just one payment to be made each month instead of [...]

Do you know which ignored prefiling issue  triggers the most reopened bankruptcy cases?
I’ve got no data but my money’s on avoidable judicial liens.
We as bankruptcy attorneys have gotten so caught up in avoiding consensual mortgages where they are totally unsecured that we forget to look for the easy stuff.  Stuff that is available to our clients in Chapter 7 and Chapter 13.
Section 522(f) essentially allows bankruptcy attorneys to salvage exemptions that appear to have been eaten up by judicial liens.
Relying on your client to point out judicial liens on their assets ranks second in risky manoevres only to asking your client about critical tax filing dates.
When your client isn’t opening his mail, and when process servers don’t bother to serve anything, it’s no wonder clients can’t tell you if their are judicial liens on their assets.
Unless you are unusually diligent pre filing,  sooner or later you will be getting the anguished call from a client whose property is in escrow and on the eve of closing, a pre bankruptcy judicial lien is discovered.

Yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld the decision of the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida holding that liens granted by subsidiaries of a borrower to refinance obligations owed to the borrower’s lenders constituted fraudulent transfers under section 548(a)(1) of the Bankruptcy Code with respect to those lenders.  In reversing the district court’s decision, the Eleventh Circuit held that the bankruptcy court did not clearly err when it found that subsidiaries of TOUSA (referred to in the opinion as the “Conveying Subsidiaries”) that granted liens to new lenders to refinance obligations of existing lenders (referred to in the opinion as the “Transeastern Lenders”) did not receive reasonably equivalent value in exchange for the granting of such liens.  The Eleventh Circuit also held that the bankruptcy court correctly ruled that the Transeastern Lenders were entities “for whose benefit” the liens were transferred under section 550(a)(1) of the Bankruptcy Code.