Your client answers once. Every form fills itself in.
BankruptcyClinic is a guided interview that turns one sitting with a client into a complete, filing-ready Chapter 7 petition packet.
You answer plain-English questions. It produces filled AcroForm PDFs of the official United States Bankruptcy Court forms — the same files any clerk or attorney can reopen and edit.
| Form | What it is |
|---|---|
| B 101 | Voluntary Petition for Individuals Filing for Bankruptcy |
| B 101A | Initial Statement About an Eviction Judgment Against You |
| B 101B | Statement About Payment of an Eviction Judgment Against You |
| B 103A | Application for Individuals to Pay the Filing Fee in Installments |
| B 103B | Application to Have the Chapter 7 Filing Fee Waived |
| B 106A/B | Schedule A/B — Property |
| B 106C | Schedule C — The Property You Claim as Exempt |
| B 106D | Schedule D — Creditors Who Have Claims Secured by Property |
| B 106E/F | Schedule E/F — Creditors Who Have Unsecured Claims |
| B 106G | Schedule G — Executory Contracts and Unexpired Leases |
| B 106H | Schedule H — Your Codebtors |
| B 106I | Schedule I — Your Income |
| B 106J | Schedule J — Your Expenses |
| B 106Sum | Summary of Your Assets and Liabilities |
| B 106Dec | Declaration About an Individual Debtor’s Schedules |
| B 107 | Statement of Financial Affairs, with continuation sheets |
| B 108 | Statement of Intention for Individuals Filing Under Chapter 7 |
| B 121 | Your Statement About Your Social Security Numbers |
| B 122A-1 | Chapter 7 Statement of Your Current Monthly Income |
| B 122A-2 | Chapter 7 Means Test Calculation |
| B 2030 | Disclosure of Compensation of Attorney for Debtor |
It also builds the creditor mailing matrix, and keeps a reusable creditor library so the same local bank, hospital, or collection agency is entered correctly once and picked from a list forever after.
One answer reaches every form that needs it
Enter the car once. It appears as property on Schedule A/B, as an exemption claim on Schedule C, as the collateral for the lender’s claim on Schedule D, as the surrender or reaffirm decision on Form 108, and in the totals on the Summary. Nothing is retyped, so nothing drifts out of sync between forms.
Exemptions with the statutory caps applied
Nebraska and South Dakota exemptions are encoded as real tables — statute cite, cap, and what it covers. A running tracker shows what is claimed against each statute and flags a claim that exceeds its cap before the petition goes to the court, not after the trustee objects.
The means test off current DOJ tables
Form 122A-1 uses the US Trustee Program median-income figures for the debtor’s state and household size, including multi-job wage cases, non-filing spouse income, and Social Security exclusions. When annualised income comes out above the median, the interview goes on to collect and assemble Form 122A-2, the long-form calculation, using the IRS Collection Financial Standards for the filer’s county.
Cross-section checks that catch court rejections
The interview compares your answers against each other and stops on conflicts:
- Schedule I income against what the fee-waiver application claims
- Schedule A/B property values against the fee-waiver real-estate page, within 10%
- The codebtor community-property answer against the same question on the SOFA
- The 730-day domicile rule for which state’s exemptions actually apply
- Case-number format, ZIP digits, SSN and ITIN format, verified state dropdowns
A wrong number on a schedule is a real problem for a real person, so correctness is enforced mechanically rather than by hoping:
- 168 end-to-end tests across 49 files, driving the interview in a browser and then reading the field values back out of the produced PDFs. Every bug a user has reported has a test that fails without the fix.
- A static form-variable audit that proves every value a PDF reads is actually collected somewhere the user will reach — including values hidden behind a conditional question, which is where petition generators usually break.
- A path-sensitive simulator that replays the interview across 72 answer configurations (filing status × payment method × debt type × means-test shape × state) looking for dead ends, loops, and questions asked out of order. Its baseline is empty and the build fails if that changes.
Every bug reported so far, with a video of the fix, is on the resolved issues page.
Bankruptcy clinics and legal aid taking Chapter 7 pro bono. Volunteers and students become useful on day one instead of week three, because the interview carries the form knowledge.
Solo and small-firm attorneys who would rather spend the hour counselling the client than retyping an address into fifteen PDFs.
Law school clinics where the point is teaching the legal reasoning, not the data entry. Students see why an exemption cap matters because the tracker shows them.
Any organisation that will not put client financial data on someone else’s server. You run it. The data stays on your machine.
The software is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. There is no paid tier, no locked feature, no seat count, and no “contact sales” wall in front of anything. Clone it, read it, run it, change it, and never speak to me.
The AGPL adds one condition worth knowing before you adopt it: if you change the software and run your changed version as a service other people use, you owe those users your source. Running it as shipped asks nothing of you. What the licence means in practice.
What I sell is my time:
- Adding your state’s exemption tables, courts, and counties
- Custom forms, intake steps, and workflow changes for how your clinic actually works
- Keeping up with DOJ median-income refreshes and revised court forms
- Training your attorneys, paralegals, and students
- Setting it up correctly, once, on a server you or your host already own
I do not host it. Other people do that well, and the install guide covers doing it yourself.