Bankruptcy Court Trustee Hearings Will Soon Be On Zoom

Bankruptcy Trustee hearings are now telephonic. That started for the pandemic, effective April 9, 2020. They are moving to Zoom, soon.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta is moving the bankruptcy trustee hearings from telephone conference calls to Zoom.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta made that announcement Friday at the annual convention of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys.  Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah switched at the first of this year.  Ohio, Michigan and Hawaii are next.  We hope Virginia will be in the next expansion.  

Zoom Hearings Should Work Better for Everyone

Before the pandemic, people in bankruptcy often lost a day from work for their three-or-four minute bankruptcy trustee hearings. In some parts of the country people had to travel hundreds of miles to the nearest Federal Court House. Here, you could spend hours in traffic trying to get to Old Town Alexandria during the morning rush.

Doing the hearings by telephone conference call avoided that travel time; but phone hearings could often be noisy and hard to follow who was talking. Zoom should work a lot better.

Why Do We Have These Hearings?

By law, people who file bankruptcy“appear” in front of the bankruptcy trustee to answer questions.  (For most people, the questions are, “Did you go over these papers when you signed them, and is everything you put there true?”) Those hearings are called “Meeting of Creditors” although creditors rarely show up. By law are between four and six weeks after we send your papers to the court. The Alexandria bankruptcy court schedules forteen an hour. So that’s four minutes or so per case.