Court Opinion

ID: 9495965
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:14:23.457252+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:17.427169
License: Public Domain

EDITH H. JONES, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
A pox on all their houses! The panel’s discussion euphemizes what was going on *695here — a useless and blatant perversion of bankruptcy. Mrs. Barron filed this Chapter 7 bankruptcy case to avoid paying a judgment owed to her divorce lawyers after she remarried Mr. Barron. She then tried, unsuccessfully, to have the case dismissed, but the trustee pleaded on behalf of “the creditors’ interest.” Four of the six creditors are attorneys, one a private investigator, and they were altogether owed less than $50,000. Mrs. Barron was due to receive, either in real property or in unmatured installments, $160,000 from her then-and-again husband as part of their divorce settlement. For unknown reasons, Mr. Barron refused to pay off his wife’s debts.
Understandably, there was confusion at the outset as to the enforceability of a divorce property settlement for a couple who have remarried. The inexorable bankruptcy-driven “logic” of this situation led to the appointment of Ms. Daniels as special counsel, on a contingency fee, with the mission of recovering value from Mr. Barron to pay off the attorney-creditors.
With the same sort of bankruptcy-driven logic, the panel concludes that the bankruptcy court should not have cut Ms. Daniels’ fee, even after she recovered “way more than was necessary” to pay the creditors and the trustee, and herself became the beneficiary of a sizeable windfall. Were the events in the adversary proceeding “capable of being anticipated”? Although I concur with the opinion, I think this is a close question.1
But what definitely should have been anticipated was the needless cost in time and administrative fees generated by Mrs. Barron’s bad-faith resort to bankruptcy in the first place. See 11 U.S.C. § 707(a) (court may dismiss a case “for cause”). She had assets. He is wealthy. She or her husband could pay the attorneys for their mutual misstep into divorce court. This case is a prime example of how bankruptcy is misused.

. A transcript from an early hearing in the case suggests considerable uncertainty surrounding the legal status of the divorce property settlement in this unusual situation. Further, as the bankruptcy court pointed out in his opinion on remand, merely enforcing the property settlement would have required considerable additional work by Ms. Daniels, since she would have had to sell or file further proceedings to obtain the real property in question, or she would have had to await the payment of installments due under the agreement. The bankruptcy court was legitimately surprised when Mr. Barron finally paid off the court's judgment against him with a check.