Last year I had to file for Chapter 7 personal bankruptcy. Having never done this before, I retained a bankruptcy attorney that I assumed would be an expert in doing this. While the bankruptcy was discharged without any real difficulty, it seems as if the instructions and assistance he provided had some serious flaws in them, including: - instructing me to include all accounts in my bankruptcy - I'm not sure if this was the correct thing to do, especially since now accounts that I had a $0 balance with and could have simply closed are showing on my credit reports as "included in bankruptcy" and possibly lowering my credit score - telling me to include all of my student loans in the bankruptcy (despite that fact that I don't think these can very easily be discharged by bankruptcy) - he then appeared very unsure of whether they were really discharged or not, and even worse, by including them in the bankruptcy, it triggered clauses in some of the contracts that allowed them to be paid by the loan insurers and then full payment was expected from me to the loan insurers. While it's very possible this might have happened anyway, at the least I would expect him to alert me of this ahead of time* so I could prepare or see if there was any way to mitigate these issues (since now I'm dealing with collection agencies) *And yes, I would expect that in today's day and age, a bankruptcy attorney would be aware of this caveat with respect to student loans - is that expecting too much? Anyway, I'm just wondering if I have any recourse against the attorney, or can do anything to try and fix some of the above problems? Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks.
