• Have been practicing in the field of bankruptcy for nearly 34 years;
• Started the first bankruptcy-only legal clinic in the Northwest over 30 years ago;
• Wrote their first bankruptcy program in Visicalc on an Apple II in the late 1970's;
• Have spoken at numerous CLE's at the local and national level;
• Have been chair and officers of the Seattle-King County Bar Association Bankruptcy Section;
• Have been members of the local Bankruptcy Rules committee;
• Have been members of the National Association of Chapter 13 Trustees;
• Have been members of the National Association of Bankruptcy Court Clerks;
• Have been members of the American Bankruptcy Institute;
• Assisted in development of new bankruptcy forms for the Judicial Conference;
• Assisted in development of the court's "case upload" prototype and file formats for CM/ECF software.

We've all heard the term "think like a lawyer". For some it's a pejorative. For us it's embedded in every feature and function of our bankruptcy software.

Software from other companies is typically written by a programmer with little or no legal training. He gets his instructions from a supervisor who has never filed a bankruptcy case or interviewed a client. In the days before Bankruptcy Reform when the law was stable, the forms rarely changed, and the bankruptcy bar had years of experience, it was less important who wrote your program. But with the recent high percentage of attorneys new to bankruptcy, a new code that only now is being interpreted at the Circuit Court level, and constantly changing forms and local rules, do you really want a garden variety database application? Or do you want something designed uniquely for bankruptcy attorneys by bankruptcy attorneys? 

One of the big myths about bankruptcy, (and why so many non-attorney petition preparers and debtors think that they can do-it-themselves) is that bankruptcy is merely a matter of filling out forms - not unlike doing a name change or filling out a driver's license application. But regardless of what the forms look like, regardless of the check boxes, regardless of the rectangles and other graphics, a petition is still a petition. It is still a legal document - a prayer for relief. It has legal consequences that should never be overlooked, minimized, or forgotten. At New Hope we never forget that our name, like yours, is on every form filed.