The Illinois Bankruptcy Lawyer Blog

Bankruptcy's Back

From MSN Money By Liz Pulliam Weston

It looks as if last year’s reform law did not really stem the enormous flood of bankruptcies after all. Here are the states with the highest bankruptcy rates. advertisement By Liz Pulliam Weston The lull in bankruptcy filings may already be a thing of the past. Consumer bankruptcy cases plunged to a 20-year low in the first three months of 2006, reflecting the passage of a tough new bankruptcy law last year. But the pace of new filings is already on the rise. Courts now see an average of 2,000 new filings a day — four times the number that were filed in November 2005 after the bankruptcy law went into effect, according to Chris Lundquist, founder of Lundquist Consulting, which tracks bankruptcy trends. If filings continue to rise at anything like this rate — which is not a given, but certainly a possibility — we could see close to 1 million filings by the end of the year. That would still be significantly less than the record filing levels that drove passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. But it would be a pretty clear indication that the bankruptcy juggernaut was just stalled, not cured, by the new law. [read the full piece]