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Good morning. We're here, uh, with, uh, Norma Hammes and Ike Shulman from San Jose, California, and the purpose of our meeting this morning is to talk about the origins of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys. I want to start off by asking first you, Norma,

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about your background and how you got involved in representing consumer bankruptcy debtors. Well, uh, it sure wasn't a family business. Uh, my dad was an iron worker. He had 6 years of school. My mom was a school teacher though, so it was pretty much understood that

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we were gonna go to college. And when I was in high school, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer, but I wanted to be something else first. So, this is in the 60s. And you probably remember that time as well and uh there were a

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lot of us that wanted to make the world a better place, and that's why I wanted to go to law school, but I was a planner for the city of San Jose and the redevelopment agency for 6 years while I was going to law school. I

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was going to law school the last 3.5 part time. And so where, where, where did you go to law school? Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, OK. And so I, I knew I did not even know an attorney at all. I never met an attorney until, uh,

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I was probably in college. And I got involved in the Model Cities program in San Jose. And um I became Uh, familiar with the process of setting up nonprofit organizations. We, that some of the activists and, and myself, we did that. And um Uh Then I

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got married while we were in law school. And the first year that Jim and I, Jim Gold is my husband, and that's also your law partner, right? Yes, yes, he is for 37 years now I guess. And so when we first started, um, We did the

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first year we did anything civil. We had no idea that we were going to be interested in bankruptcy, but this is right when. And what was the first year? 1978, right before the code came into effect. It had been passed, but it wasn't going to be

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in effect until 1979. So some of the uh the civil work that we did included a few bankruptcies under the Act. And that was interesting, but because we didn't have a whole lot of business at the time, we had time to read the bankruptcy code, the

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new bankruptcy code. We realized how much interesting things were involved in chapter 13 under the code. And so then we started filing 13 when it came into effect. And who were the bankruptcy judges at that time? Judge Moore and uh Abrahams, I believe he was

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there at that time or shortly thereafter. So, um, so you just kind of got into it kind of like, yeah, mhm, mhm, and the fact that we didn't really like anything else, although we had a lot of interesting experiences in the other areas of civil law,

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family law, corporate law. Uh, we did real estate things, so I mean we got enough information because and and experience in those areas which certainly translates to bankruptcy. If you don't know anything about those areas and you go into bankruptcy, you're kind of floundering. So it

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was very helpful. So Ike, how about you? How did you get involved in this? Well, in a pretty roundabout way, I started off on a different path in life, or at least in my planning of life, and I'd always wanted to be a doctor. Uh, I

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went to college. I finished at the University of Wisconsin, but I had been very sick during my college years. I had a chronic illness, didn't do well in, uh, science classes, didn't get into med school. And I wasn't in the best of health, so instead of

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starting my professional career, I landed a job in the post office in San Jose. And I helped me rebuild my house while there, I got very active in the letter carriers union, became a shop steward. Said, well, maybe I want to go to law school. I

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also had started getting heavily involved in politics. I grew up like Norma and and herself during the Vietnam War years and it was a crucible that formed many of our uh political orientations for the rest of our lives, including myself. So I had an advocacy that

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And uh while uh working for the post office, I went to Santa Clara University Law School, and this would have been when uh I went from 79 to 84. I went night program, took, took my time had uh we, my wife and I just had our

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first child, so. It was like a 5 year night program and worked in the daytime carrying mail. And when I finished, I was still looking for a job. I hadn't been placed anywhere. And we had a poker game in San Jose that was uh a lot

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of politicos that I have met over the years, and one of those happened to be married to a bankruptcy lawyer named Marilyn Morgan. And at one of our monthly poker games, uh, his name was Jim Towery, and Jim later became state bar president in California. Jim

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says, like, did you ever think of doing bankruptcy law? And I said, not really. Hadn't taken the debtor creditor class in law school because it wasn't offered at night. Never thought twice about bankruptcy, but. I knew that firm was actively involved in uh In in the

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political arena, they did a variety of different things. I said, why not try bankruptcy. And so I got hired two weeks later and which firm was that that was the, uh, at the time it was Morgan Morgan Towery Morgan Spector, uh, and it had uh Judge,

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uh, later Judge Marilyn Morgan, her father Robert Morgan, who was a very, uh, renowned lawyer in San Jose, and her brother and her husband and another, uh, attorney who's gone on to have a lot of success by Spector. So Marilyn hired me and she mentored me

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in bankruptcy and it was really Uh, a great opportunity for me to get started because she wore all kinds of bankruptcy hats. First, she was the county bar president at the time, so she was busy with bar activities. She was a Chapter 7 trustee. She represented

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consumer debtors in sevens and thirteens. She represented individual creditors in uh bankruptcy cases. She did small business chapter 11. And so I got the pedoply of experiences in this first two years and the first you you started with them when 1986, 1986. All right, so, uh,

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who was the most, it sounds to me like Marilyn Morgan for you was the most influential person, uh, in your development in the practice. How about you, uh, well, I was thinking about that and We didn't have any mentors as such other than you might say

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Duncan Kester, who was the Chapter 13 trustee at the time, and he really was very supportive, emotionally supportive, and you know, he took the new attorneys under his wing and you know, he showed them the ropes and you remember that too. Do you remember that about

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Duncan Kester? And I would say if anyone it would it would have been him. Who were the most prominent consumer debtor lawyers, if you know, both locally but also nationally? Were there any that that you came to know or came to know of at that time

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and early in your practice that you knew were, you know, really prominent. Uh, for example, did you know Henry Sommers? We didn't know Henry until we formed AGBA, OK, but perhaps that leads to a broader question. Uh, was there any national, uh, consumer bankruptcy practice at

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the time? No, I mean, I was, I had no visibility of it whatsoever. I mean, I, I, Jim and I started off and we, we were just a local practice and um. I had 3 kids from 1983 to 1988, so it was, you know, just running

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the practice, having my kids. Um, I had my, I was basically pretty low to the ground and you know, the internet wasn't up and running then. So were you aware of the American Bankruptcy Institute, for example, which started about I was aware of it. Uh, in

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my first year, uh, Marilyn Morgan sent me to. In the annual conference of the National Association of Chapter 13 Trustees at ACTT, it was in Newport Beach that year, not far from San Jose. And that's where I really got my first exposure to consumer bankruptcies from

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out of our region, and I met some, uh, folks, one of the attorneys from our town, Phil Blower, who was one of the more senior consumer practitioners in San Jose. took me around and introduced me to a number of other prominent lawyers. An attorney, the, the

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probably the biggest filer in Chicago, Mel Kaplan. And there were others of their generation a little bit older than us that had known each other for decades, and that was my first real sense of how, how, uh, the practice was being done so much differently everywhere

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and it was kind of a real what did you say that was in '86 you met them. OK. Um, Well, what was the practice practice like when you started? Uh, you had, uh, Warren Moore, who was not a bankruptcy lawyer before he went on the bench.

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I don't know whether Abrahams was or not. Was it a judge, um. Was it a Chapter 13 trustee kind of driven practice or was it like it was in many districts I know or was it more of a judge driven practice or were people reading

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the law and applying it? Yeah, actually I, I give my husband Jim a lot of credit. He was probably, I think he was the only one in our area that actually read the code. And so, you know, anybody who knows Jim knows he's not, he's not

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embarrassed to go up and say, hey, I think it worked like this. So, you know, we, we would go in with chapter 13's where we would cram down, cram down a car, change the payments, obviously, reduce the interest rate, and everybody's going, Hey, you have to

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do the contract payments. And we said, where does it say that in the code? So there was a lot of that that happened. It was just developing. People were just starting to realize what was in the code at the time. What a powerful tool, Chapter 13

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absolutely, absolutely. And and that was different from under the act, no question about it, because as you, as you know, you could not affect, you could not impair or deal with secured claims of any kind of any kind, not just house claims, but any kind, right,

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right. So that was a huge change in the code. Prior to the internet and the abundance of written materials regarding consumer bankruptcy practice, were there other treatises that you could read or look at if you were a person starting out in the practice or if you

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needed to do some legal research? Where did you start with that? Well, I mean, I think Matthew Bender was Collier's Collier on bankruptcy is what we used in our firm, you know, Cowan's. Uh, early on, uh, I subscribed to, uh, Consumer Bankruptcy News, which was an

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LRP publication, not that it was a, uh, a thorough and LRP published bankruptcy court decisions which are red binders of decisions. I don't even know whether they're there anymore. The consumer bankruptcy news would highlight a lot of those cases of interest that were coming up around

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the country and that that was another tool that I think a lot of consumer lawyers. Just to keep on top of where the trends were going, right, right, but you've mentioned, uh, Cowan. Uh, Dan Cowans wrote a treatise, was a bankruptcy judge, and I guess he

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was a, he would have been a judge, not a referee, and in San Jose, right? Yes, yeah, but, uh, before your time, before he was still practicing the act, right, I think. I don't think he was under the code at all. OK. And he wrote a

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treatise, uh, that was one of the few out there at the time, isn't that correct? Yes, OK, um, and you said you referred to it, uh, well, we, we had counts on bankruptcy and just by happenstance, uh, when Marilyn Morgan sent me out to do my

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first deposition. It was Dan Cowans representing a creditor. Oh, yeah, we, we ran into him as an attorney in the 80s. What was he like? Oh, he was a very, uh uh I think a warm, friendly guy, uh and he enjoyed uh the practice of law.

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I, I think he was uh. Uh, comfortable in that element, um, you know, he was more senior when I got to know him and, uh. But uh he was, he was I thought professionally he was very pleasant person to deal with and he probably took a

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little mercy on me having my first death. So, uh, how did the practice evolve during the 1980s? You've mentioned, I think, uh, that suddenly people were reading the code for the first time, uh, if they ever read it. Some of them I don't think ever, but

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those that did actually read the code were finding out all sorts of things that uh were amazing about what could happen in chapter 13, um. How did your practice evolve? when did you start seeing more and more people come in and seek uh bankruptcy relief? Oh

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well, one of the interesting things is right when we started practice, um, I can't remember the name of the case, but um we were attorneys were first allowed to advertise in the Yellow Pages as well as anywhere else. So we were actually pretty lucky because otherwise,

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where are you gonna get your clients from as a new attorney, but Um, again, no internet, no internet. You were the yellow you had the yellow pages and billboards and and and and bus benches, so that's about it. And a year or two before we started

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practice, you couldn't advertise in the yellow pages. So, so that was the thing. And once we um we survived the first year and decided that hey. Do we want to stop this? No, I think we're fine. I just, I've heard a buzzing and I, is it

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your phone? OK. OK. Anyway, so, uh, after we survived the first year and realized that what we wanted to do was bankruptcies, um, we then advertised and we got quite a bit of clients. We, we got a good percentage of the, the filings, you know, within

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a year or two. So you were one of the first in, in San Jose, I guess. Yeah, well, you know, actually there, you know, Phil Blower and Stan Zlotoff were going before we started, and Javed Elahi also, a really great guy, really great guy,

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and Rich Wagner, he passed away probably 1520 years ago. But he was a practitioner as well, but those are the, those were the few that were really practicing. When did you first start seeing uh the first real Big numbers in terms of numbers of people starting

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to go into bankruptcy. Well, my practice started in '86 and for the first several months, uh Marilyn Morgan sort of had me review all different facets and I told her. She asked me what what I was interested in. I said, I want consumer bankruptcy representing debtors.

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And so at the time she had a fair chapter 13 practice and I said in my mind I said look if I focus on this I can really build it because it was such an effective tool that with so many different problems that People had that

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if I Advertised more to do that we would get more business and in fact I did. I went out and spoke from my union background. I went out and spoke to a lot of labor organizations in the San Jose area and to other groups and basically

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explain what the tools that were available to help people, not just save their house but deal with tax debts, cars that we're about to reboot the whole realm of protections that we could give people, and I think probably. After about 1988, 1989, I saw that practice

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start to really fill in. When I would say before that, probably before you started practice uh in the early 80s because I can remember like around '83, 184, there was a lot of real estate uh turmoil and hard money loans where there were balloon payments. And

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so we saw the first Fallout from that kind of thing in the early 80s trying to figure out how to deal with that problem in a Chapter 13. Well, during that period of time, also, that was during a time when before credit cards became ubiquitous and

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you had corner loan shops like Thorpe and AVO and a number of small loan shops that Uh, would basically tell the debtor to go home and make an inventory of their goods and then come back and give them $2000 but they also got a lien on

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everything they owned. Did you, one of the new provisions in the code was the ability to uh to avoid that lien. Um, did you see many of those kinds of cases back in the early 80? a few, quite a few. That's that's a very good in

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the late 80s when I was practicing too, that was a. Huge problem and of course we had a cure for that ailment. Yeah, yeah, it was wonderful to be able to avoid those lanes, right? You couldn't get the cars freed up, but you could get everything

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just cram down yeah you could cram down the cars and get everything else freed up through the 522. F2 now it's yeah it's it used to be just yeah, yeah, um, so, uh, that brings us then I think to what factors and people led to the

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formation of NAPA. Well, um. Around the end of 1991, Uh, I was really getting enthusiastic about being a bankruptcy lawyer. I really liked what you got into it, and in fact I was starting to get bored. In fact, uh, going back a couple of years in

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San Jose, there was a very collegial bar, a very collegial group of consumer debtor lawyers. Some of the, uh, folks that have been mentioned so far Phil Blower, Rich Wagner, uh, Norman, her husband Jim, my boss Marilyn, uh, Javid Elahi. They would have meetings maybe once

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a month or two to talk about the common problems. They were competing for business maybe on the outside, but the reality is they were all sharing their knowledge. I mean we're competitors, but sharing their knowledge and approaches of what worked, what happened in your last case,

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what did the trustee do here? So they developed a bond and we had a very unified bar. And In 1989, a couple of years before we formed ACPBA, uh, My former boss, Marilyn was now a bankruptcy judge in San Jose, and she wanted Once she was

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on the bench, she saw that there wasn't really an effective mechanism for the consumer bar to communicate with the Northern District of California judges or with the San Jose division judges. About procedures and problems and so she suggested to the then uh chair of the Santa

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Clara County Commercial Bankruptcy and commercial Law Section. that they created Chapter 13 subcommittee. And uh the person that she approached was uh Elaine and Marilyn another San Jose lawyer at this point I think at that time she was in San Francisco if I'm not mistaken, but

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she had a practice she did practice. So Elaine called me up and I think maybe a Marilyn's suggested and said, would you be willing to help organize and share this. And I said, absolutely, well, Marilyn had talked to me and said she was going to Uh,

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she thought that would be a good idea and I said, absolutely. So in uh like in September of '89, we used this informal group and created a formal group, and by the end of the year, we had like 28 to 30 members. And it was a

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really good time for us locally because all three of our judges, Judge Judges, uh, Abrahams and Moore had retired and we had 3 new judges, 2 that had been on the bench for 1 year, Jim Grove and Marilyn Morgan, and one that just arrived, Arthur Weisbrook.

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So it was an opportunity for us to make an imprint with the local bench and to have a tool to work with them. Well, in the fall of '91, I was communicating with our local group about how Congress had a lot of proposals out there that

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we're going to curb these great tools we were using. We were just talking about stripping liens on household goods. Well, one of the provisions that what Congress was looking at was removing the ability to use 522F to wipe out house you learn that? Just tracked uh

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legislation and uh what's what what would have spurred you to track of legislation bankruptcy news articles that came through our office. So again, the bankruptcy law reporter or whatever whatever the LRP was because I used to get it too. We would share with each other and

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I might have been the one most focused on what was happening in Washington politics and it was really alarming because some of the sponsors of these weren't weren't uh uh. Backbenchers but rather senior members of the leadership and Democrats and Democrats who had controlled Congress at

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that time for like 40 years or close to it and in the Senate side, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee was Senator Hal Hefflin, and on the House side.