Can’t help myself. I have to share this.<\/p>\n
I’m on an email list where I get all sorts of updates concerning bankruptcy law. My email this morning brought me news of a North Carolina bankruptcy court decision where the case was dismissed as having been brought in bad faith. What was the bad faith?<\/p>\n
It seems that the petitioner, a woman who had just finished a divorce process, was filing the petition in bankruptcy primarily to make her attorney fees for the divorce go away. Through the divorce process she had obtained exempt assets in excess of $250,000 in value; and the lawyer’s bill was about $42,000; but the lawyer had already expressed a willingness to settle for $20,000.<\/p>\n
The court appears to have reasoned that as this person went ahead with her contentious divorce, the lawyer had a reasonable expectation to be paid from the “equitable distribution recovery” of assets in the divorce case, and the filing of bankruptcy right after the divorce was in bad faith.<\/p>\n
This is an example of what I hear referred to as the “smell test.” There is probably no specific provision in the bankruptcy code that says you can’t list your attorney fee bill in a bankruptcy right after the divorce. But under these particular circumstances, the bankruptcy court judge clearly did not like the way it smelled.<\/p>\n