Court distinguished between POCs filed without a copy of the writing upon which the claim is based and claims without proof of assignments. This backs up the trend that Courts won’t give Debtors what they consider a windfall, for attacking undocumented claims (because that is too, too hard for poor eCast), but will knock out a claim doesn’t show that the right party is being paid.
Another case coming up: Schwab v. Reilly, No. 08-538. When a debtor in bankruptcy claims an exemption from the bankruptcy estate for a certain asset using a specific dollar amount that is equal to the value placed on the asset by the debtor, is the exemption limited to the specific amount claimed, or do the numbers being equal operate to “fully exempt” asset, regardless of its true value; also, does the bankruptcy trustee have to abide by the 30-day period of Rule 4003 for filing an objection to the debtor’s claimed exemption Case law is all over the place. One circuit (the 4th I believe) said that when one says $1 it is full disclosure that the debtor intends to take the full amount and not just $1, thus the $1 puts the trustee on notice to object if the trustee believes that the PI settlement will exceed available exemptions, or just to preserve the trustee’s rights. Which seems to be the decision here, that by taking the full value as the exemption the trustee was on notice the debtor was exempting the full value and should have objected if he thought the value was wrong. The 8th cir says $1 means $1 and that is all you can exempt, and the trustee doesn’t have to object to preserve his rights if you later amend to claim a higher amount. The trustee will always object to an exemption in the amount of unknown to perserve their rights. Hopefully the Supremes will write an opinion broad enough to also answer the question of how to list exemptions in an amount that is unknown at the time of filing. I know what happened after the 4th cir ruled that $1 put the trustee on notice that the debtor intended to take the full value available, and the full value of the property if no objection was filed, was that all our trustees started objecting to almost everything that had some question to it.
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