I have been spending much of my lawyering time in bankruptcy, in one capacity or another, for almost thirty years. When I started out I knew very little about bankruptcy. I had taken a course in law school from Bill Kampf and Gene Levy, but that was about it. As a new lawyer I had the luxury of spending a lot of time in the District Law Libraryk, which at that time was up on the third floor of the Stearns County Court House. Judge Hoffman's chambers were located there, too, and I became friendly with Judge Hoffman's law clerk. He later went to work for a local firm, and became the chapter 7 panel trustee for St. Cloud. Fairly soon thereafter, he decided to concentrate on other areas of the law, and (probably remembering that I seemed to have a lot of spare time) called and asked if I would like to be his replacement as chapter 7 panel trustee for St. Cloud. I agreed and after a very little bit of training, I was conducting "first meeting of creditors". At about that time the location of those meetings moved from the Stearns County courthouse to the basement of the federal building at St. Germain and 8th Avenue. The facilities, frankly, were not very good -- for instance, there was no elevator at that time -- but I was thrown into the deep end of the pool and had to try to figure things out quickly.
It helped, frankly, that the bankruptcy law had been thoroughly revised with a 1979 effective date, because that meant that most of the attorneys who had been doing bankruptcy had to re-educate themselves and learn how the new law worked.
My recollection is that I started out with 20 cases a month, and after a while I was handling 40 cases per month, or more, as trustee. Trustees at that time were paid $20 per case, plus a percentage of whatever assets were collected. So, it took quite a long time for any money to actually start coming into my office for my trustee work. Fortunately, my overhead was very low, too.
It was a tremendous learning experience, and shaped the rest of my practice, because after handling a number of cases as trustee I began to file cases on behalf of debtors.
