Marc Charles Capone

Marc Capone

Unfortunately, Tatiana's facts are inaccurate and deceptive. I filed a Chapter 13 for her husband. The fee charged was the standard fee of $3,500, half paid prior to the filing and half being paid thru their plan. He paid the $1,750 plus the court's filing fee of $310 up front. We performed all of the work needed to get his case confirmed, in fact, i resolved the State of NJ objection due to his unpaid sales tax owed by his business and was able to get the State to not shut his business down and allow the sales tax to be paid thru his plan. I also filed a modified plan to deal with the Trustee's objection, and made multiple Court appearances at these hearings. Unfortunately, Mr. A did not make his monthly Trustee payments as required to proceed and confirm his plan. In fact, when he finally called us back after our multiple requests to have him contact us regarding his delinquent payments, he indicated that he would not be able to continue with his case, as he had been found guilty of a crime and was being incarcerated. A fact he neglected to tell us prior to his bankruptcy filing, even though he knew about the charges at the time. The Trustee thus dismissed his case for lack of payments being made. The $1,200 that he had paid to the Trustee was disbursed to my office as required by the Bankruptcy Code towards my unpaid fees. I also had additional fees awarded by the Court for the modified plan that was filed and the additional court appearances in the amount of $500. Thus, at the time of the dismissal, Mr. A still owed my office $1,050 in fees for his chapter 13. I did not attempt to collect these fees from him given his unfortunate circumstance. I was then contacted by Tatiana about filing for her, as she had no income now to try to save her home and just wanted to be discharged from her debt. Our standard fee for a chapter 7 is $1,750 plus the filing fee of $335 and credit report of $35. Given her circumstances, i agreed to take $1,000 for our fee, plus the filing fee. I told Tatiana at the beginning of the process that if she wanted to include her incarcerated husband on the petition, she would need to get a power of attorney from him and we would need to file a motion with the Court to allow her permission to testify at the 341a hearing on his behalf. All of this would be at an increased cost to her as it was not part of a normal chapter 7 plus i had already giving her a large discount. Tatiana never indicated that she wanted us to do this work. In fact, from the time she contacted us it took her over year to actually get us everything we needed to file her petition. She finally got us everything on the eve of Sheriff's Sale, so even if she wanted to add her husband at that point, there was no time to get all the work done to accomplish that and file her petition prior to the Sheriff's Sale. As for not returning phone calls, that is also completely inaccurate. Between myself and my staff based on our time records we spoke to Tatiana over 30 times during the course of our representation, and that is not including emails and correspondence to her. It is unfortunate that someone that we bent over backwards to try to help at a greatly reduced rate because of her circumstances, would now choose to bash us because apparently they wanted us to do more work for them for no additional fee. Apparently, she feels that she is somehow entitled to this. The fact of the matter is that despite the fact her husband still owes me fees for his chapter 13 and despite the fact that I filed a chapter 7 for Tatiana for almost half of what our normal fee is and despite the fact Tatiana received her Discharge, she and her husband somehow believe they are entitled to a free chapter 7 for Mr. A. Amazing, but that is the world we live in! I truly wish them well and hope they get their lives back on track.