So if someone decided to go through a bankruptcy, stopped paying bills and never followed through with a lawyers help. In this situation Could the state find in favor of the creditor without proper notification to debtor . Meaning can the creditor seize bank funds without serving papers to the debtor? My girlfriend stopped paying her creditors due to some bad advise. Now the bank allowed the creditor to seize our savings.
Any advise would be helpful thanks,
ANSWER
Yes, if you wait too long to file bankruptcy and the lawyers for the bank who are suing you file a motion, they can see the funds in your accounts.
When you said” decided to go to bankruptcy, but never follow through with lawyers”, I take that as and you didn’t file bankruptcy. If you decide to file bankruptcy, but never actually file bankruptcy and receive a discharge, bankruptcy is not part of the equation at all. There is a legal motion called “Ex-Parte Motion for Trustee Process”, in which if the plaintiff demonstrates that most likely they will win the lawsuit or if they’ve already won the lawsuit and feel that you would just hide the money, they could file this motion and sees the money out of the defendant bank account. So either your girlfriend had a lawsuit against her, lost it and the bank used the motion I listed above or if they prove to the court that they would when, in the case of most lawsuits by banks, they could have used the same motion. The problem is, the courts do not distinguish between whose money does, it just needs to have your girlfriends name and Social Security attached to it, and the court have the right to seize all the funds in that account.
In this particular situation, there is a big difference between winning the lawsuit and simply using the motion I listed above before filing the serving the lawsuit on your girlfriend. If the lawsuit is a new lawsuit and is not over, filing bankruptcy would dissolve the lawsuit and the trustee process. If the lawsuit is over, and judgment was awarded to the plaintiff, the money is lost.
The only possible issue in this situation is when you file bankruptcy, chapter 7 bankruptcy that is, the bankruptcy trustee liquidates nonexempt assets. You get to exempt a certain amount of money, depending on state law, and the rest the bankruptcy trustee would take to pay off your creditors. A good bankruptcy lawyer can make it so you can keep most of your money, but it depends on how much money were talking about. Also with the use of an experienced bankruptcy attorney, arguments can be made that the money was in fact yours, and you just happen to have your girlfriend’s name on the account when the money was seized.
Joseph F. Botelho, Esq.
BOTELHO LAW GROUP
Attorneys At Law
901 Eastern Ave.
Unit 2
Fall River, MA 02723
Office: 888-269-0688
Email: jbotelho@botelholawgroup.com
https://www.botelholawgroup.com/
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