Revised Bankruptcy Forms Go Into Effect December 1
By U.S. Courts, December 1, 2015
This post has been viewed 2,463 times.
This post has been viewed 2,463 times.
U.S. Bankruptcy Court filers and lawyers must use new forms beginning December 1, when the first modernization of bankruptcy forms in two decades takes effect.
Among the most significant changes:
- Individuals and businesses will have different documents for opening cases. At present, individuals use the same filing forms as the largest corporations, and must pore through potentially confusing questions not relevant to their cases.
- Plain-English instruction books have been written for individual and business filers. Instructions also have been embedded within forms, so that filers can get immediate guidance next to the boxes they are filling out.
- Property inventories have been combined into one form, and individual filers are given a comprehensive checklist to insure that relevant assets are listed.
- Form layouts will be simpler and more intuitive. Questions for individuals require primarily yes/no and multiple-choice responses, reducing potential for incorrect answers.
- All documents will have new numbers, to accommodate the new individual and non-individual categories.
- Case-opening documents for individual debtors (in contrast to corporations) will have fillable PDFs, so that users can type information into the documents.
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