Customization and support

The software is free and stays free. What I sell is changing it to fit your jurisdiction and keeping it correct.

I am Alex Clark. I wrote BankruptcyClinic, I maintain it, and it is in production use at a Nebraska bankruptcy clinic.

I do not offer hosting. Other people do that well and it is not the part I am useful for. See who can host it for you below. My work starts once you have a server, wherever it lives.

Your state added

Nebraska and South Dakota ship today. Adding a state means researching its exemption statutes and caps, having an attorney in that state verify them, encoding the table, adding the district courts and counties, and wiring the state into the means-test data. Fixed fee, quoted per state.

The result is contributed back to the open-source project, so the next clinic in your state gets it free. That is deliberate.

Custom forms and workflow

Local forms your district requires, cover sheets, intake questions specific to your screening process, changes to how the interview is sequenced for how your volunteers actually work. The interview is built to extend; this is normal work rather than a rewrite.

Maintenance

A petition generator rots quietly. Nothing breaks, no error appears, and the numbers it prints are simply last year’s. The three things that go stale are:

• Median-income tables. The US Trustee Program republishes them roughly every six months. A stale table puts the wrong figure on Form 122A-1 and can flip the presumption-of-abuse answer.
• Official Forms. The courts revise them. A revised PDF usually renames or moves form fields, and docassemble fills by exact field name — a renamed field silently prints blank rather than raising an error.
• Statutory dollar amounts. The federal figures adjust on a three-year cycle, and state legislatures change their own exemption caps on no schedule at all.

On a maintenance contract I watch those sources, make the change, and prove it did not break anything before it reaches you. Proving it is the part that takes the time: the package carries 168 end-to-end tests that drive the interview in a browser and read the values back out of the produced PDFs, plus static checks that catch a builder key no longer matching a template field — the failure mode that otherwise ships as a blank line on a filed form. You get a versioned package update and a note saying what changed and why.

Cap changes are the exception to “I just do it”: a statutory amount goes to an attorney licensed in that state for verification before it ships. I do not take an LLM’s or my own word for a number that appears on a court filing.

Set up correctly, once

Not hosting — a one-time job on a server you or your host already own. I deploy the package, wire it to your sign-in, run a test petition end to end, and hand it over. After that the server is yours or your host’s to run.

Training

Walk-throughs for attorneys, paralegals, and students, recorded so you can reuse them for the next intake of volunteers instead of booking me again.

BankruptcyClinic runs on docassemble, so anyone who hosts docassemble can host this. These three are worth a look. I have no arrangement with any of them and I get nothing if you sign up — this is a starting list, not an endorsement, and you should do your own diligence on anyone holding client financial data.

Suffolk LIT Lab — Document Assembly Line

A university legal-innovation lab, not a company. They describe offering “affordable docassemble hosting and e-filing tools for courts and legal aid organizations” — their words. If you are a legal aid office or a court, start here. Contact them at litlab@suffolk.edu.

Lemma Legal Consulting

A legal-technology consultancy that specialises in docassemble, run by Quinten Steenhuis, who spent twelve years as a legal aid litigator before this. They host the interviews they build and say they have special rates for nonprofits. The docassemble project’s own deployment page names them. Good fit if you want the host and the developer to be the same people who already know this software.

Elestio

General managed hosting for open-source applications, docassemble included. Not legal specialists — this is infrastructure. They handle installation, updates, backups, certificates, and monitoring, you pick the cloud and the region, and pricing starts around $16 a month. They publish ISO 27001, SOC 2, and GDPR compliance claims, which your risk reviewer may want to see.

Hosting it yourself is also completely reasonable — the install guide covers it, including the hardening a live server needs.

One licence point before you sign with anyone. BankruptcyClinic is under the AGPL, so if your host modifies it for you and runs that version as your public service, the modified source has to be available to the people using the site. Running it unchanged asks nothing of you or them. Agree who publishes what before the work starts, not after — the details are here.

Email alex@clarkmanagementconsulting.com and tell me:

• Your organisation, and whether you are a clinic, legal aid office, law school, or firm
• Which state or district you file in
• Roughly how many Chapter 7 cases a year
• Where it will run — your own server, or a host from the list above
• Anything jurisdiction-specific you already know you need

I will come back with a scoping note and a price. If the honest answer is that you should just install it yourself and not pay me anything, I will tell you that — the install guide is complete on purpose.

That is a supported path and it costs nothing.

Pull requests are welcome, particularly new state exemption tables. If you add your state, say so in the pull request and note who verified the statutes.