Was Cutting the Cord, Getting rid of the monkey

[Christopher Browne]

More simply, the people doing the work to prepare the legal filings
reasonably expect to be paid for the work they are doing.

There's certainly a Catch-22 here, and a troublesome one (albeit arguably
less bad than the original Catch-22 wherein the participants risked getting
killed; they were in the throes of WWII, after all.)

Filing for bankruptcy requires preparing and filing some set of legal
documents, and if you haven't the money (which is kind of likely, under the
circumstances where you're keen on doing so), it may not be possible to do
so.

Those of us on this mailing list are presumably reasonably literate (as we
have the habit of reading and writing), which means we could all imagine
preparing those filings ourselves, assuming they aren't too opaque or
counterintuitive.  To folks that aren't literate, there's a big extra dose
of scary there.

The fees aren't obvious as something the government ought to cover.  (At
another end of the spectrum, I could see an article in the Sun yapping
about that, to the effect that "Those crazy lefties want to add insult to
injury by having Us Responsible Tax Paying People pay for their foolishness
that led to their bankruptcy.  And bankruptcy?  We're just paying those
lefties' bills!!!"  The Sun is *so* strange...)  It's not obvious to me
that the government should pay to perform such filings; it's not
self-evident that any of the levels of government ought to be properly
considered responsible.  But at leaves a strange looking gap, because
someone who has had their assets seized to cover debts is vanishingly
unlikely to have terribly much left over.  Indeed, the reason to declare
bankruptcy is that one's debts considerably exceed one's assets; otherwise,
it's not worth the trouble.

Giving the law firm first dibs on any of the last bits of assets is
probably necessary in order for such a system to work, but seems rather
strange from a fairness perspective; it makes them look pretty vulture-like.

What I *imagine* is better is for this to be the sort of work that a
general purpose law office would do pro-bono, though the tendency to
specialize leads towards this getting dropped out, and pressed into the
place where it is actually seen, namely with firms specializing in it,
which means it *cannot* be done pro-bono, as those people need to eat, and
it's not at all reasonable for their office to have no source of income.
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