That's not my name!
It's been a pretty mixed up morning so far...
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That is apparently real. I don't know who got into the testing kitchen, but clearly they were stoned before they got there.
Next, these sights on the walk this morning:

We expected this sort of notice, just not spray-painted in the middle of the road. Last month, the town notified us that they would finally be ripping up and repaving the roadway on our street. They did a few corner curbs a few weeks ago and put up a ROUGH ROAD sign, but that was it until this arrived this morning. They're slowly putting up paper signs on trees, but it's a pity this will be removed. I was going to turn the P into a B and see if it will get the neighborhood dogs to shut up every time they see a squirrel.
Then, around the corner, this:

It's been out there for days. It's the neighbor, probably close to our age, with the rescue Amish dog but no kids or grandkids that might be waiting for that bus. Garbage pickup isn't until tomorrow, so I don't think that's it. Is it for the Grand Marshal of a very small parade? To just watch the weird neighbors across the street from her that we lovingly refer to as "the Munsters?" It's not the street being ripped up, either, so who knows?
----
Back to the name that isn't, though: despite me doing basically the same job for going on 40 years, there's always something new to deal with.
When somebody or something files a bankruptcy case, the court creates a "docket." In my decades doing this, it's gone from a typed manila card to an internally generated computer file to, for most of this century, a publicly accessible electonic one that is largely created by the attorneys who file the cases and enter the information themselves. Way way back, we had to be trained in how to do this without launching missiles or breaking the government; some courts even gave us tests before we would be given the sacred login to enter things ourselves. Mickey Mouse was a very popular debtor in training days, as was this guy:

Note that only the last four digits of the social appear for public consumption. In fact, there is no actual paper document submitted to the court containing the full nine digits, except ones filed by unrepresented individuals filing the case in paper form the old-fashioned way. Attorneys transmit it separately in an electronic file that nobody sees except creditors, who get the full number on the one and only official Notice of Filing the court sends out.
One thing that at least our court's computer always does, once it has that full nine digit number, is run it against the entire US courts database to see if it has ever been used on a filing before. I cannot tell you why it does this; there are restrictions on refiling by individuals, mostly connected to cases that have been filed in the previous eight years under current law, but we are already required to list any of those on the petition itself. Our court dockets used to list any cases going back as far as at least the early 1980s, but only cases filed in Western New York would show up. Now, any case anywhere at any time since the current bankruptcy law took effect in 1979 get listed. Again, there's no legal reason for it beyond morbid curiosity for any case beyond the present eight-year window, but there they are, for whatever they may be worth.
Here's a not-my-client example, of one of the more egregious "frequent flyers" in our local court I represented a creditor against:

Yeah, he was special. Note what information is there for each time his full social pinged the computer: his case number, district, full name, filing date, disposition date and type (typically either discharged of debts or dismissed without discharge). All of that is potentially interesting; only one piece of it might be difficult beyond strictly legal consequences:
the full prior filer's name.
----
Meet Nott. As in Nott Hisrealname. He came to me a few months ago to file a bankruptcy case. He's married, but she's not filing. Because of other rules, her income and expenses became relevant to the filing, but her personal information, beyond being listed as a co-signer on one debt, was never part of the case. I never ran her credit report, referred her for credit counseling (Nott had to do that) or had any reason to even ask for her social security number.
When we were finally ready to sign and file, they had a question. One of the wife's bills was showing up as being in "bankruptcy" status, whatever that meant. I knew it wasn't because of anything I'd filed- I hadn't filed anything for him yet, much less her- but I asked for her full SSN to see if maybe somebody else had used that number on a filing.
They had. There's a national database anyone with an access-to-electronic-filing login can check, to see if any particular name or SSN has a filing attached to it. The government charges for this, so I don't recommend name searches on a nationwide basis, but when I ran her social, several cases came up. One of them was within the past eight years, which means she couldn't have filed jointly with Nott even if they'd wanted to.
Usually, at least up until now, I hadn't run this check on my own incoming clients. My intake forms ask about filings within the past eight years, and that's all that is really relevant legally. Here, though, because she had a prior filing within that window, I decided to take the extra step to see if Nott had filed anything that might be disqualifying on that basis.
He hadn't. But. There were prior cases under that social. The name wasn't under "Nott Hisrealname," though. It was "Notta" Sometime in the past decade, a she became a he, and now, when I filed this case, anybody looking up his filing would see that was the case.
I reported this to him before filing, and he was fine with it. There's no reason for it to have any legal relevance to the case itself, but with all the other shit going on in the world, I got to wondering why there's even a need to put this information on a court docket. It's not just this particular issue, known among those who experience it as "deadnaming;" a spouse or significant other might have left an abuser or stalker in their lives, changed their name, and given that guy (face it, it's probably a guy) a confirmation of their new name and address matching the one he knew them under. Again, what good is accomplished by risking what this information might mean to the person filing the case, which could be as much emotional as financial?
In response to this conundrum, I have done three things:
- My intake question about prior filings now has this highlighted language in it:
IMPORTANT: These cases within the past eight years, filed anywhere under any name using your SSN, may affect your eligibility. ALSO, ANY filing at any time, anywhere under any name using your SSN, will put a “PRIOR” flag on your docket and an entry may appear on it listing the date, case number and name under which you filed that case, even if it was 10 or even 40 years ago. Please check here if such a disclosure would provide any issue for you. No Yes
- I am also going to drop the dime each time to run the incoming client's full SSN through that national database to make sure this, or any other issue about prior filings, isn't going to arise.
- Finally, I have written the clerk of the court to let her know, in general terms without identifying Nott as the affected person, what happened here, to ask if it is something this court has any control over, and to consider the consequences ot it if they do. My past experience with the current holder of the job is she will either pass it on to her bosses the judges or tell me even before that, Sorry, nothing I can do about it. If it DOES make it to a judge's meeting, I have a pretty good idea how that will go: there are two active ones and a semi-retired one concluding his prior cases and handling conflict cases for the other two. He, and the Rochester judge, used to be clerks of the court and still speak Clerkese pretty fluently.
Semi-retired Buffalo judge (if he even still goes to the meetings): will shrug, and say, Meh, that's a good idea to take that out.
Active Buffalo judge: will need someone to explain to him what "deadnaming" is, on hearing it will turn beet red for 10 seconds, and THEN shrug, and say, Meh, that's a good idea to take that out. Only probably without the Meh.
The former clerk in Rochester is less predictable. I've got him down to three choices: same as the other two; write it off as more crazy talk from Ray; or take it Incredibly Seriously and order the immediate scrubbing of every one of tens of thousands of case dockets over the past 40-plus years to prevent any potential harm from this.
Stay tuned to see if I even get a response. If not, I can always spraypaint NO DEADNAMING in the middle of the road and see how it goes.
It's been a pretty mixed up morning so far...
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/AOMWQMDRGVAITF6DPIYW7J6NCQ.png)
That is apparently real. I don't know who got into the testing kitchen, but clearly they were stoned before they got there.
Next, these sights on the walk this morning:

We expected this sort of notice, just not spray-painted in the middle of the road. Last month, the town notified us that they would finally be ripping up and repaving the roadway on our street. They did a few corner curbs a few weeks ago and put up a ROUGH ROAD sign, but that was it until this arrived this morning. They're slowly putting up paper signs on trees, but it's a pity this will be removed. I was going to turn the P into a B and see if it will get the neighborhood dogs to shut up every time they see a squirrel.
Then, around the corner, this:

It's been out there for days. It's the neighbor, probably close to our age, with the rescue Amish dog but no kids or grandkids that might be waiting for that bus. Garbage pickup isn't until tomorrow, so I don't think that's it. Is it for the Grand Marshal of a very small parade? To just watch the weird neighbors across the street from her that we lovingly refer to as "the Munsters?" It's not the street being ripped up, either, so who knows?
----
Back to the name that isn't, though: despite me doing basically the same job for going on 40 years, there's always something new to deal with.
When somebody or something files a bankruptcy case, the court creates a "docket." In my decades doing this, it's gone from a typed manila card to an internally generated computer file to, for most of this century, a publicly accessible electonic one that is largely created by the attorneys who file the cases and enter the information themselves. Way way back, we had to be trained in how to do this without launching missiles or breaking the government; some courts even gave us tests before we would be given the sacred login to enter things ourselves. Mickey Mouse was a very popular debtor in training days, as was this guy:

They largely still look like that. Those codes in the upper right are called "flags," which may reference something needing to be filed like "DEBT ED" (the "traffic school" requirement for a human being to get a discharge in a case) or, in the example, "727OBJ" (a fairly rare one of someone objecting to a debtor getting a discharge of their debts) or, as we will get to below, "PRIOR."
Note that only the last four digits of the social appear for public consumption. In fact, there is no actual paper document submitted to the court containing the full nine digits, except ones filed by unrepresented individuals filing the case in paper form the old-fashioned way. Attorneys transmit it separately in an electronic file that nobody sees except creditors, who get the full number on the one and only official Notice of Filing the court sends out.
One thing that at least our court's computer always does, once it has that full nine digit number, is run it against the entire US courts database to see if it has ever been used on a filing before. I cannot tell you why it does this; there are restrictions on refiling by individuals, mostly connected to cases that have been filed in the previous eight years under current law, but we are already required to list any of those on the petition itself. Our court dockets used to list any cases going back as far as at least the early 1980s, but only cases filed in Western New York would show up. Now, any case anywhere at any time since the current bankruptcy law took effect in 1979 get listed. Again, there's no legal reason for it beyond morbid curiosity for any case beyond the present eight-year window, but there they are, for whatever they may be worth.
Here's a not-my-client example, of one of the more egregious "frequent flyers" in our local court I represented a creditor against:

Yeah, he was special. Note what information is there for each time his full social pinged the computer: his case number, district, full name, filing date, disposition date and type (typically either discharged of debts or dismissed without discharge). All of that is potentially interesting; only one piece of it might be difficult beyond strictly legal consequences:
the full prior filer's name.
----
Meet Nott. As in Nott Hisrealname. He came to me a few months ago to file a bankruptcy case. He's married, but she's not filing. Because of other rules, her income and expenses became relevant to the filing, but her personal information, beyond being listed as a co-signer on one debt, was never part of the case. I never ran her credit report, referred her for credit counseling (Nott had to do that) or had any reason to even ask for her social security number.
When we were finally ready to sign and file, they had a question. One of the wife's bills was showing up as being in "bankruptcy" status, whatever that meant. I knew it wasn't because of anything I'd filed- I hadn't filed anything for him yet, much less her- but I asked for her full SSN to see if maybe somebody else had used that number on a filing.
They had. There's a national database anyone with an access-to-electronic-filing login can check, to see if any particular name or SSN has a filing attached to it. The government charges for this, so I don't recommend name searches on a nationwide basis, but when I ran her social, several cases came up. One of them was within the past eight years, which means she couldn't have filed jointly with Nott even if they'd wanted to.
Usually, at least up until now, I hadn't run this check on my own incoming clients. My intake forms ask about filings within the past eight years, and that's all that is really relevant legally. Here, though, because she had a prior filing within that window, I decided to take the extra step to see if Nott had filed anything that might be disqualifying on that basis.
He hadn't. But. There were prior cases under that social. The name wasn't under "Nott Hisrealname," though. It was "Notta" Sometime in the past decade, a she became a he, and now, when I filed this case, anybody looking up his filing would see that was the case.
I reported this to him before filing, and he was fine with it. There's no reason for it to have any legal relevance to the case itself, but with all the other shit going on in the world, I got to wondering why there's even a need to put this information on a court docket. It's not just this particular issue, known among those who experience it as "deadnaming;" a spouse or significant other might have left an abuser or stalker in their lives, changed their name, and given that guy (face it, it's probably a guy) a confirmation of their new name and address matching the one he knew them under. Again, what good is accomplished by risking what this information might mean to the person filing the case, which could be as much emotional as financial?
In response to this conundrum, I have done three things:
- My intake question about prior filings now has this highlighted language in it:
IMPORTANT: These cases within the past eight years, filed anywhere under any name using your SSN, may affect your eligibility. ALSO, ANY filing at any time, anywhere under any name using your SSN, will put a “PRIOR” flag on your docket and an entry may appear on it listing the date, case number and name under which you filed that case, even if it was 10 or even 40 years ago. Please check here if such a disclosure would provide any issue for you. No Yes
- I am also going to drop the dime each time to run the incoming client's full SSN through that national database to make sure this, or any other issue about prior filings, isn't going to arise.
- Finally, I have written the clerk of the court to let her know, in general terms without identifying Nott as the affected person, what happened here, to ask if it is something this court has any control over, and to consider the consequences ot it if they do. My past experience with the current holder of the job is she will either pass it on to her bosses the judges or tell me even before that, Sorry, nothing I can do about it. If it DOES make it to a judge's meeting, I have a pretty good idea how that will go: there are two active ones and a semi-retired one concluding his prior cases and handling conflict cases for the other two. He, and the Rochester judge, used to be clerks of the court and still speak Clerkese pretty fluently.
Semi-retired Buffalo judge (if he even still goes to the meetings): will shrug, and say, Meh, that's a good idea to take that out.
Active Buffalo judge: will need someone to explain to him what "deadnaming" is, on hearing it will turn beet red for 10 seconds, and THEN shrug, and say, Meh, that's a good idea to take that out. Only probably without the Meh.
The former clerk in Rochester is less predictable. I've got him down to three choices: same as the other two; write it off as more crazy talk from Ray; or take it Incredibly Seriously and order the immediate scrubbing of every one of tens of thousands of case dockets over the past 40-plus years to prevent any potential harm from this.
Stay tuned to see if I even get a response. If not, I can always spraypaint NO DEADNAMING in the middle of the road and see how it goes.