Attorney Find Blog

Yesterday, the Administrative Office of the Courts released–at long last–bankruptcy filing statics for the last quarter of 2006. Thus, for the first time we have an official count on the number of bankruptcy filings during 2006 as compared to 2005, and naturally there’s a significant difference. 2006 filings totaled just over 617,000, a dramatic drop from the more than two million filings in 2005.

But of course, that came as a surprise to no one. We all saw the huge glut of filings in the fall of 2005, when the law was abou to change and consumers were under the impression that they wouldn’t be able to file after October 17. And in the aftermath, a variety of factors kept filings down, not the least of which was that a lot of people–probably a couple of hundred thousand of them–who would otherwise have filed in 2006 had rushed to do so in the fall of 2005.

But the clear fact that never seems to make the headlines is that filings have been steadily climbing since shortly after the new bankruptcy law took effect in the fall of 2005, and they continue to climb. The first quarter of 2006 saw 116,771 filings, while the comparable period in 2007 recorded an estimated 186,788 filings–that’s an increase of more than 50%. The exact point where the rush and dearth settle and we find the true post-BAPCPA levels remains to be seen, but current filing rates make it seem likely that we’ll bring in 2007 in the neighborhood of 1 million filings.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Bankruptcy Law and Bankruptcy Lawyers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.