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If you’re facing bankruptcy in Georgia and are wondering how to find the best bankruptcy attorney in Atlanta, this article will lay out what the best way to find the best foreclosure attorney is for your situation and how to prepare for your foreclosure attorney in Georgia.
Best Bankruptcy Attorney In Atlanta Georgia: When To Hire One
If you’re a homeowner facing bankruptcy due to financial problems, you’ll need to decide not only if it is worth your time to fight the bankruptcy, but also if it is worth paying for a for the best bankruptcy attorney to help you. In some cases (say you have a valid defense to the bankruptcy and want to keep your home), you’ll need a bankruptcy lawyer to assist you. In other instances, such as if your goal is to stay in the home through the bankruptcy process in Georgia or just to gain some additional time before the bank completes the bankruptcy eviction, it often makes sense to go at it alone.
Here’s the first bit of advice from bankruptcy lawyers in Atlanta: Before contacting a lawyer, call a HUD-certified housing counselor. An experienced, well-connected counselor can cut through red tape and streamline the process of getting a mortgage modification, if that’s what you want. Even if you end up working with a lawyer to fight foreclosure process, the counselor will help you get organized.
After talking with a counselor, if you still want to consult a lawyer, it’s time to search for one. There are a number of ways to do it.
A Google search will find articles, like this one, that quote bankruptcy lawyers. I would say the most common way is the typical way, which is by word of mouth.
Best Foreclosure Lawyer Near Me: How To Find One
1. Google search “best bankruptcy attorney near me.”
Google is great at determining a radius near your location and finding the best relevant bankruptcy attorneys near you. You’ll want to stick to a fairly close location to your house in foreclosure because you don’t want to have to drive 1.5 hours just to see your bankruptcy lawyer everytime you need to speak with them.
2. Sort for the best bankruptcy attorney in Atlanta Georgia
Sort your business listing by the ratings. We recommend sorting by 4.5+ stars. This will give you the bankruptcy attorney in Atlanta, Georgia with the highest reviews. The disclaimer here is that you may only find bankruptcy attorneys that have 1-2 reviews. If you want to find a bankruptcy lawyer in Atlanta with more reviews then you may have to reduce the amount of stars that they have to 3.5-4 star reviews. These bankruptcy lawyers may not be as good, but you have many more options.
Read through the reviews and see which attorneys may be best suited for helping you with your case. Find out how to best spot fake reviews on the bankruptcy attorneys that you are vetting out. You want to make sure that the reviews talk about the issues that the bankruptcy attorney solved for those people avoiding foreclosure in Georgia.
3. Best Bankruptcy Lawyers In Atlanta: Beware Fake Reviews
So what are the tells that a “five-star” bankruptcy attorney might end up being grumpy old man who doesn’t give a hoot about your situation? According to Cornell research, you should beware if a review,
- Lacks detail. It’s hard to describe what you haven’t actually experienced, which is why fake reviews often offer general praise rather than digging into specifics. Truthful bankruptcy lawyer reviews, for example, are more likely to use concrete words relating to the foreclosure, like ‘loan modification,’ ‘court’ or ‘avoiding foreclosure.’ Deceivers write more about things that set the scene, explains the research release.
- Includes more first person pronouns. If you’re anxious about coming across as sincere, apparently you talk about yourself more. That’s probably why words like ‘I’ and ‘me’ appear more often in fake reviews.
- Has more verbs than nouns. Language analysis shows the fakes tend to include more verbs (word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence) as their writers often substitute pleasant (or alarming) sounding stories for actual insight. Genuine reviews are heavier on nouns (nouns refer to the individual name of a person, place or thing).
4. Notice Ads for Foreclosure Defense Attorneys in Georgia
When you search for ‘best bankruptcy attorney in Georgia,’ you’ll notice that you see 1-3 business listings at the top with “Ad” written on the listing. This doesn’t mean that the foreclosure attorney isn’t better than any of the others or worse. It just means that the lawyers who practice bankruptcy law are paying Google to show up at the top of the searches. Usually the top three listings below the Ads have the most authority and relevancy in Georgia foreclosure laws in Google’s eyes through reviews, relevant blog articles, years in business, etc.
Questions to Find the Best Bankruptcy Attorney In Atlanta
When picking a bankruptcy attorney to represent you during the bankruptcy process, you should speak to several different lawyers who practice bankruptcy laws to get more than one perspective and learn about all of the foreclosure options available to you. Below are a few questions you should ask of a bankruptcy attorney in Atlanta Georgia when you are considering hiring to assist you with bankruptcy issues.
- What course of action do you recommend to stop my foreclosure?
- How much experience do you have representing homeowners in court to avoid foreclosure (or in filing bankruptcy, or in getting a loan modification, etc.)?
- Have you taken any continuing legal education courses about bankruptcy laws and strategies in handling bankruptcy matters?
- How much will it cost to hire you to stop my foreclosure?
Be sure to ask as many questions as you need to ensure that you’re comfortable about your hiring decision.
An appointment with a bankruptcy attorney is a business meeting. Act accordingly.
I would say this about hiring a prospective attorney to assist with a bankruptcy : You’re not looking for a new friend. You’re not hiring a life coach or a therapist. It doesn’t really matter how you got where you are, but where you want to be.
Sounds harsh, but the point is that you must speak succinctly and talk about facts and not about emotions. And know what you want: Do you need help negotiating a loan modification workout? Do you seek a new loan to settle a claim of predatory lending? Do you simply want to buy time? Do you want to avoid a deficiency judgment?
Avoid Bankruptcy Attorneys In Atlanta Georgia Who Will Rob You
A bankruptcy lawyer shouldn’t take your money if you don’t have sufficient income to support your household mortgage. The foreclosure attorneys who, without knowing what your income is, immediately says, ‘I can help you, I can save your house,’ then they may not be worth their salt.
Beware the opposite spiel, too. The top warning sign: The bankruptcy lawyers say, ‘Well, there’s nothing you can really do about it. You haven’t been paying. I can buy you maybe six months, maybe a year. But eventually you’re going to lose your house.’ That doesn’t give you much confidence, does it?
Sometimes lawyers helping clients avoid foreclosure will tell their clients that all they can do is buy them time. “But I’m doing it with a purpose,” they say. They tell some clients: “I can stall this for a little bit, but you’ve got to realize the point of stalling is to get you a job so you can get back on your feet and reinvent yourself.”
Beware of bankruptcy lawyers who charge a flat rate to handle a case from start to finish, and ask how many cases they are handling during your bankruptcy process case.
To avoid hiring a bad bankruptcy lawyer, you should be on the lookout for certain warning signs including:
- The lawyer promises that you’ll keep your home. No lawyer can promise results or a certain outcome. A lawyer should only promise that he or she will do his or her best to aggressively work for you. Ultimately, the judge makes the decision and the foreclosure attorney cannot predict the outcome of your foreclosure eviction.
- The attorney claims to have special skills or abilities in negotiating a mortgage modification with the bank. There’s really no “trick” to getting a mortgage modification and very little negotiating actually occurs in the loan modification process. The loan servicer (the company you make your payments to) or the investor (the owner of the loan) has certain requirements that borrowers must meet in order to get a loan modification, and if you qualify, you’ll get one.
- The attorney charges an exorbitant fee to represent you. It is not unheard of for some foreclosure attorneys to charge well over the going rate, which is usually based on location within Georgia and the attorney’s experience with foreclosure laws and handling foreclosure eviction cases in Georgia. For example, some disreputable bankruptcy attorneys have been known to charge as much as $650 an hour in foreclosure matters. Ultimately, when trying to decide if a foreclosure attorney’s fee is reasonable, ask yourself whether the attorney is charging a fair amount considering the services provided or is he or she trying take advantage of your situation.
Bankruptcy Attorneys In Georgia: When Not To Hire One
If you don’t have any reason that you should hire a foreclosure attorney, such as the bank messed up your foreclosure paperwork, you were wrongly foreclosed on, or any other reason, then it doesn’t make sense to hire a bankruptcy lawyer during your foreclosure process in Atlanta.
Unfortunately, though, you will still be going through Georgia’s foreclosure process. You have a maximum of about 130 days from late payment until you go through the foreclosure evictions.
If you want to stop your foreclosure, working with a company like Breyer Home Buyers who can pay cash for your house and close within 14 days. This will allow you to get the money to pay off your lender within the window of pre foreclosure so that you avoid foreclosure.