Randomly Distributed Trial Court Justice: A Case Study and Siren from the Consumer Bankruptcy World
Forthcoming in American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review
by Gary Neustadter*

“Between February 24, 2010 and April 23, 2012, Heritage Pacific Financial, L.L.C. (“Heritage”), a debt buyer, mass produced and filed 218 essentially identical adversary proceedings in California bankruptcy courts against makers of promissory notes who had filed Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy petitions. Each complaint alleged Heritage’s acquisition of the notes in the secondary market and alleged the outstanding obligations on the notes to be nondischargeable under the Bankruptcy Code’s fraud exception to the bankruptcy discharge. The notes evidenced loans to California residents, made in 2005 and 2006, which helped finance the purchase, refinancing, or improvement of California residential real property. When issued, the notes were secured by junior consensual liens on the real property, but subsequent foreclosure of senior consensual liens, precipitated by the mid-decade burst of the housing bubble, left the notes unsecured.

This article reports an empirical study of these bankruptcy adversary proceedings. Continue reading →