In my work as a bankruptcy attorney, I attend Chapter 7 “341 hearings” with my clients. That’s the typically routine and fairly short meeting with the bankruptcy trustee that everyone filing bankruptcy attends a month or so after their petition is filed. Because these are public meetings, I can observe the people who file bankruptcy without an attorney, and there are many cases that prove how dangerous it is to file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy without an attorney. The question of whether hiring an attorney is really necessary or even helpful is discussed in a book that was recently published, Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class. In the compilation of scholarly articles, one of the chapters focuses on “pro se” filers (those without attorneys). The author, Asst. Professor Angela K. Littwin of the University of Texas School of Law, analyzed data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, “the leading [ongoing] national study of consumer bankruptcy for nearly 30 years.” She concluded, “that pro se filers were significantly more likely to have their cases dismissed than their represented counterparts.”
In another closely related study from last year, Prof. Littwin concluded that “17.6 percent of unrepresented debtors had their cases dismissed or converted” to Chapter 13, [while] only 1.9 percent of debtors with lawyers met this fate.” Even after controlling for other factors such as “education, race and ethnicity, income, age, homeownership, prior bankruptcy, whether the debtor had any nonminimal unencumbered assets at the time of the filing,” “represented debtors were almost ten times more likely to receive a discharge than their pro se counterparts.” In her carefully understated and scholarly appropriate way, Prof. Littwin concluded that “there may always be additional unobservable factors for which I cannot control… [b]ut this analysis suggests that filing pro se dramatically escalates the chance that a Chapter 7 bankruptcy will not provide a person with debt relief.”
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