Central District of California - 2012 Pro Se Annual Report

Impact from Assistance by Non-Attorneys

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Significant progress has been made in providing assistance to good faith litigants who cannot afford counsel. A substantial stumbling block in understanding the pro se numbers is sorting out which dismissed cases are due to a lack of guidance and which are intentionally abusive or fraudulent. The pro se cases that are fraudulent and filed solely to abuse the automatic stay are included in the total pro se filing numbers along with good faith cases that fail. The Court has limited ways of determining how and why the pro se cases are filed because judges rarely see these debtors. Those who assisted debtors are frequently not disclosed. Then the cases are dismissed at high rates before the meeting of creditors so that no inquiry can be made.

In order to distinguish between intentionally abusive filings and misguided good faith filers, the Court sought more ways to distinguish between the different groups comprising the 28,730 debtors who filed without counsel. Two programs partially implemented in 2011 were in full operation in 2012 – programming a notation in the Court’s case management system (CM/ECF) when there is a disclosed bankruptcy petition preparer (BPP) and the Debtor ID Program. In the Court’s 2011 report, the disclosed BPPs had only been tracked for two months. Shortly before this, the Debtor ID Program was also instituted, requiring individuals filing any document without an attorney of record to provide photo identification. These two programs show how the different types of “self-representation” break down among the debtors otherwise categorized simply as pro se by the CM/ECF system. Self-represented debtors in this district generally fall into one of the following four categories: (1) those who prepare the case on their own without paying for assistance, (2) those who obtain assistance from a self-help desk, (3) those assisted by BPPs who disclose their involvement and (4) those who are assisted by BPPs who received compensation secretly.

  1. Debtor ID Program
  2. Bankruptcy Petition Preparer (BPP) Tracking
  3. Chapter 7 Success
  4. Chapter 13 Failure
  5. Burden on Court Staff
  6. Fraud and Abuse
  7. Language Barriers
  8. Professional Involvement in “Pro Se” Fraud Cases