13 Practical Considerations for IncreasingYour Chapter 13 No-Look Fees

1. Nothing is more important to your business and success than making sure you get paid enough money to:

• Pay your bills,
• Hire and keep good staff,
• Build your business, and
• Be and remain profitable, through thick and thin.

2. It is GUARANTEED: The time you spend to get your No-Look fees raised will net you the highest hourly rate of return in your lifetime.

Note: Based upon the relatively minimal amount of time spent, our efforts to get our No-Look fees increased will, over the course of my career, have netted my law firm over $100,000/hour.

3. Right now, at this point in time, you have a unique opportunity. We “baby boomers” who got the modern day practice started back in 1978 are fast dying off, and the price of entry into this tricky, complex, and obscure area of law is too much for the vast majority of young lawyers, most of whom are not even looking this way.

If your judges don’t act quickly to allow No-Look fees to rise so that you can hire and train a new generation of attorneys and staff, there will quickly be too few attorneys and staff to handle the now-burgeoning help that only filing bankruptcy can provide.

4. Others promise, but only bankruptcy delivers.

5. The meek may well inherit the earth, but the meek consumer bankruptcy lawyer will not get the No-Look fee sufficient to thrive in business. Shyness and trepidation will get you nothing.

If you need or deserve higher fees or better treatment for your attorney fees, you need to stand up and be counted.

Do not be ignored. 

If you can’t do it alone, get others involved. Remember, a rising tide raises all boats, and for the time being, there will be plenty of clients for everyone. The fee increases you get will help everyone.

Sometimes, reaching out to others for help is the answer. Many times, for as good as we are at standing up for clients, we are terrible at standing up for ourselves (ergo, the phrase: “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client”).

The bottom line: Ask not, receive not.

Ask, ask, and ask, and you will receive. Remember: The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

The worst that can happen is that you get turned down.

6. If you have not recently gotten a substantial increase in your No-Look fee, the timing could be perfect. If the timing is right to approach your judges, every day of delay hereafter is a day of lost income you could have had and used to rebuild your practice after COVID.

7. Best yet: You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We have successfully argued in favor of increased No-Look fees six times in North Carolina. And we will keep providing you with all of our arguments, approaches, practical considerations, and supporting documents.

We will keep you updated as more information becomes available and we are able to collect more strategies from other attorneys.

Here are a few resources to check out?

• This spreadsheet gives you the data on No-Look fees for all the Federal Districts in all the 50 states.
• This spreadsheet gives you access to attorneys who were likely involved in getting their fees raised, or who will be able to direct you to those who did.

This will give you access to the experience of attorneys who already plowed this field, who have been trailblazers, who have succeeded in getting their fees raised, who have the experience to keep you from making mistakes, many of whom will, if asked, provide you with the story of how they did it and what they submitted.

8. Whatever you do, don’t give up and don’t give in. Remember to ask:

• Why other Districts and not yours?
• Do you not work as hard as the attorneys in other Districts?
• Are you less deserving than the attorneys in other Districts?
• Should your judges do less for your District than other judges have done for theirs?

Be the squeaky wheel. Be the presence that cannot be ignored–not aggressive, but always present. Be the turd in the toilet that simply won’t flush.

9. You only get one shot at this every so many years, so:

• Think out your strategy carefully.
• Affiliate with other attorneys to build momentum.
• Identify, convince and activate your district’s influencers to help you, whoever they are.
• Then, prepare fully, including every good argument available.
• Where necessary, pick your timing carefully.  Talk to as many judges, trustees and colleagues as possible to determine whether the timing is right. Has it been long enough since the last increase?
• Has something happened that you can feed off of? Perhaps the laws or rules have changed.
  • For example, the law changed in 2005 with the passage of BAPCPA.
  • The Bar is shrinking, and your area needs to attract new blood into the Consumer Debtor Bankruptcy Bar.
  • This is a period of huge inflation, forcing you to pay more for staff or to give raises you can’t afford.
  • It’s been long enough since the last increase, and the last increase was not big enough.
  • Perhaps there were changes in judges, or your area is still suffering from COVID. Or maybe your area keeps losing staff to higher paying jobs.

10. Get your colleagues involved and complaining. Why is this important?

If you are the only one complaining, your judges will naturally think that no one else cares and therefore, it’s not really a problem or concern and therefore not that important.

Work your colleagues up into a lather  regarding the injustice/unfairness of not being paid sufficiently. How?  Use the arguments you have learned herein. As a bonus, you will learn if something is off about your argument. if you can’t get traction with other attorneys, something is wrong.

• Perhaps your timing is bad.
• Or, you might need better arguments.
• You might be the wrong person to motivate judges. In this case, talk to lawyers with influence or who file more Chapter 13 cases. Talk to sympathetic Chapter 13 trustees. If possible, talk to sympathetic judges.

11. Take into account the fact that every judge is different from every other judge.

Correspondingly, your approach has to include arguments and approaches tailored to what each judge cares about, taking into account any pet peeves that might disrupt your initiative. Remember, it only takes one  judge to kill the momentum and shut the whole process down.

Different arguments and different approaches will appeal to different judges. For instance, one judge might care more about making sure attorneys get paid. Another might be more concerned about a shrinking Consumer Debtor Bankruptcy Bar.

Practice pointer: Use every argument you can think of. You don’t know what is going to win the day with any particular judge.

Another pointer: Consider offering alternative approaches if judges seem to be in objection to your request. For instance, a big increase could be substituted with several smaller increases over the course of a few years. You might request an escalation clause based on inflation. Or, you can ask for better payment priority for your attorney fees. Some jurisdictions give all the first dollars paid in.

12. Get advice and counsel from everybody, even including recently retired judges or Chapter 13 Trustees. They know your sitting judges better than anyone.




13. You may be the one that has to do all the work. At least that was our experience, even though all the other attorneys benefited.