The defendant list is not a creditor list

The list that becomes a preference portfolio is built from an accounts-payable subledger and the debtor’s statement of financial affairs. It carries remit-to addresses, lockbox addresses, trade names, and payees who were never the creditor — factors who took assignment of a receivable, agents who passed funds along, entities that merged, renamed, or dissolved in the years since the payment cleared.

Those records are adequate for accounting and inadequate for litigation. The costs land in predictable places: service under Bankruptcy Rule 7004(b)(3) requires mailing to the attention of a named officer or managing or general agent, and defective service produces defaults that can be vacated later — the same defendant paid for twice. A complaint naming the wrong entity invites an amendment fight over relation back. A defendant that dissolved four years ago supports a judgment worth nothing. A defendant that is itself in bankruptcy is not a cost problem at all — it is a stay problem.

Filing fees, service, and mediation fees are estate expenses on every action in the portfolio, including every action that was never going to recover anything. Those expenses are incurred before anyone knows which category a defendant is in.

The window that matters is earlier than most portfolios are worked. Section 546(a) generally runs two years from the order for relief; a screen at month 15 still changes what gets filed, and a screen at month 23 only changes how it is described.

Section 547(b) directs that an action be brought “based on reasonable due diligence in the circumstances of the case and taking into account a party’s known or reasonably knowable affirmative defenses under subsection (c).” What that language requires in a given case is counsel’s question and the court’s, and nothing here answers it.

What we produce is the underlying record: for each defendant, what was examined, what the estate’s records showed, which subsection (c) defenses were computed and at what figures, and what remained unresolved. The computation is deterministic, every lookup is dated and sourced, and exceptions are listed rather than absorbed — nothing is silently dropped from a portfolio.

Where the estate’s own records support a defendant, the record says so plainly. That is the point of running it before filing rather than after.

An omnibus objection commits the estate to an exhibit: dozens or hundreds of claims, each with a stated ground and a proposed outcome. The grounds that fail cost more than the ones never asserted, because a contested response converts a ministerial filing into litigation over a claim that was always going to be allowed.

We test each asserted ground against the estate’s records before the exhibit is committed: duplicates, including the two-debtor listings that are not duplicates; amendment chains, and whether the objection targets the operative link; claims recorded as satisfied; priority classification, where goods the debtor received in the 20 days before the filing are typically paid in full while ordinary unsecured claims are not; documentation sufficiency; bar-date arithmetic; and variance against the books, bridged line by line.

The output separates the grounds the records support from the grounds they do not, so the exhibit that gets filed is the one that holds.

Portfolio engagements are quoted against the size of the portfolio and the state of the underlying data, agreed in writing before work begins. We take no contingency, no percentage of recovery, and no share of any settlement — on either side. Our fee does not move with the outcome, which is the only arrangement under which a screening record is worth producing.

Creditor-side engagements are published at a flat rate. See the fee schedule.