AIzaSyCuK3Ucgvu8ezvMRfG4TlCl4IJeXtWiWdA Skip to main content
Monthly Archives

February 2022

How Bankruptcy Can Help Stop A Repossession

By Uncategorized No Comments

Filing bankruptcy can help car owners keep their vehicle.

If you have missed several car payments, then you may be worried that the loan company is going to repossess your vehicle.

When faced with this threat, many attempt to hide their cars, avoid calls from loan companies, and keep their vehicles locked in a garage somewhere until they can come up with the money needed.

However, many loan companies have the capability to track vehicles through GPS trackers that are installed on cars that have an outstanding payment connected to them. Some also have the capability to prevent you from starting your car through employing devices called starter interrupters.

These technologies can make avoiding a repossession seem like a losing battle for many.

Instead of living in a state of fear that the loan companies will repossess and impound your car at any moment, many debtors can file for bankruptcy and receive legal protection from loan companies so that your vehicle, and other property, cannot be repossessed, at least until the case is settled.

DISCLAIMER: The following blog post is just advice, and you will be better served to call David S. Clark with your bankruptcy questions. This blog contains helpful tips and advice, but is not professional legal advice, and shouldn’t treated as such.

Need Bankruptcy Help? Call David S. Clark

Bankruptcy Issues a Stay Order on Repossessions

Often debtors complain about loan companies and the repossessors acting on their behalf for being mean, overly-aggressive, and demanding in their attempts to repossess a vehicle.

Though there is no excuse for the immoral behaviors that some repossession and loan companies use in attempts to repossess a vehicle, the unfortunate reality is that because these loan companies have a legal claim to the vehicle when loan payments are not made, they are permitted to make these attempts at possessing the vehicle.

As soon as an individual opens a bankruptcy case, however, an automatic stay is ordered on the vehicle. This means that creditors and their partners, legally cannot touch your vehicle at least until the bankruptcy case is settled.

Stay Orders and Repossessions

As soon as the court issues a stay order, the creditor has no rights to demand you hand over the keys to your car.

No matter how much they hounded you to have the car before you filed for bankruptcy, once the case is open the law is on your side.

Simply put, stay orders protect car owners from repossession.

Bankruptcy Temporarily Protects From Repossession

Though stay orders issued from bankruptcy case filings will keep a creditor from taking your car for a time, this is not necessarily a permanent fixture. These stay orders are put in place so that debtors can have time to work through restructuring their debt through bankruptcy without having to constantly fight off repo agents.

Because the purpose of stay orders is not to permanently keep creditors from repossessing your car, there is still a chance that at the end of your bankruptcy case, you may be required to give up your car in order to meet the requirements of the bankruptcy settlement.

Bankruptcy, though, gives you a chance to keep your car and legally protects you from any potential bullying or intimidation from loan companies.

David S. Clark, An Auburn & Opelika Bankruptcy Attorney

David S. Clark and his team have been helping Auburn and Opelika, AL residents avoid repossession through bankruptcy for years and have the experience necessary to advocate your case before a bankruptcy court and in the face of intimidating loan companies.

If you are facing repossession in Auburn or Opelika and are considering filing for Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy, contact David S. Clark today.

DISCLAIMER: The above blog post is just advice, and you will be better served to call David S. Clark with your bankruptcy questions. This blog contains helpful tips and advice, but is not professional legal advice, and shouldn’t treated as such.

Moses Wenslydale Moore–Alabama’s First African American Attorney

By Attorneys & Lawyers No Comments
The information in this post was gathered from the research compiled in an article from the December 27, 2021 edition of The Alabama Lawyer entitled, “Blazing the Trail: Alabama’s First Black Lawyers.” To read the article in its entirety, click here.

In a piece commemorating the first graduating class of African American attorneys of Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C., a black newspaper commissioned them with the sobering reminder that they were going “into the world…to give to the false and hate inspired charge of the black man’s natural inferiority a living, forcible, and effective denial.”

One of those graduates, who likely read those very words and personally felt their gravity as one being commissioned, was Moses Wenslydale Moore.

DISCLAIMER: The following blog post is just advice, and you will be better served to call David S. Clark with your bankruptcy questions. This blog contains helpful tips and advice, but is not professional legal advice, and shouldn’t treated as such.

Need Bankruptcy Help? Call David S. Clark

An Inspiring Immigrant

Born in British Guiana on February 15, 1841, Moore was born a free man since Britain had already granted emancipation to enslaved people in 1832.

Not much is known about Moore’s early life, but years later in 1867, Moore was listed as a schoolteacher sailing from London to New York. The next year and a half of Moore’s life once again fell into relative historical obscurity, though we can be sure that he faced much uncertainty while in America given the state of the country after the Civil War during the tumultuous early years of Reconstruction.

In 1869, though, Moore enrolled at the Howard University School of Law to be a member of the 6-man class of black lawyers. This group of aspiring attorneys met in the home offices of their professors since they did not have proper classrooms at the time and they took evening classes since all of them worked full-time jobs.

The Move to Mobile

Following their graduation from the Howard University School of Law in 1871, all 6 graduating men were admitted to the Washington, D.C. bar. Soon after Moses Moore departed the nation’s capital bound for the Deep South–Mobile, Alabama.

One can only speculate what this black man was thinking while en route to the embattled “Heart of Dixie.” Six years prior to Moore’s move men, women, and children who looked like him were bound to work and live in subhuman conditions as slaves.

Surely many friends and family told him that attempting to work as an attorney was too dangerous for a black man. However, Moore was evidently undeterred and bound to be a “living, forcible, and effective denial” of hatred motivated by racist bigotry.

Admitted: An African American Attorney

While in Mobile, Moore was presented for examination in order to be admitted to the Alabama State Bar with no little public interest. After a “very satisfactory examination,” Moore was successfully admitted to the bar.

He then moved to Selma–further into the heart of Alabama–and it was when he lived here that he stood before the Alabama Supreme Court seeking admittance to practice law within the state. On January 4, 1872, Moses Wenslydale Moore was admitted to practice in Alabama.

A Black Lawyer’s Legacy

After only a few years in Alabama, Moore moved to Mississippi for a short time and then took the voyage back across the Atlantic to be an English professor in France.

Though little is known about the actual legal practice of Mr. Moore in Alabama and observers of history can speculate as to why he decided to leave Alabama, the South, and the United States altogether; he offered a unique contribution to Black history in the United States.

In the face of great uncertainty and danger, Moses Moore did what none before him had done in becoming the first African-American Attorney in Alabama and for that all Alabamians owe him our admiration and thanks.

DISCLAIMER: The above blog post is just advice, and you will be better served to call David S. Clark with your bankruptcy questions. This blog contains helpful tips and advice, but is not professional legal advice, and shouldn’t treated as such.