DO NOT PUBLISH THIS FILE or copy to public repo. Draft for Dan's review only.
I'm building a national map of bankruptcy cases that were mathematically doomed before they were filed. I need people to run my tool on other districts.
Some of you saw my earlier posts about a stdlib Python tool that screens bankruptcy court data for impossible cases.
The short version: federal law says if you already got a bankruptcy discharge recently, you can't get another one for a set number of years. It's three dates and subtraction. The lawyer is supposed to check before filing. Some don't. The client pays thousands in fees for a case that was dead before it started.
I've been running the screener on my local districts. 56,563 cases screened, 360 flagged, 14 hand-verified, all real. 114 of those cases in the multi-district sample actually got a discharge anyway, meaning the court missed it too.
Now I want to know if this is everywhere or just where I'm looking.
I'm building a national map of these cases and I need your help running the tool on other districts.
What I need: People to pull free CSV exports from the federal court records system (PACER), point the script at them, and tell me what falls out. The repo has a step-by-step guide. Takes about 30 minutes. The searches are free. The tool is stdlib Python, no dependencies.
New since the last post: There's now a practice report tool that runs against the same CSVs. It generates a full scorecard per attorney, volume, outcomes, case duration, dismissal rates, statutory compliance, repeat debtors. Same data you're already pulling. Run --oneline to get a one-line summary per attorney, or --all to profile every attorney in your directory at once. If you run --control it builds a side-by-side comparison table. New in v1.1: --markdown outputs Reddit-ready tables, and --leaderboard --username YOUR_NAME generates a paste-ready submission block so you can post results in one copy/paste.
What you'd report back: Run --leaderboard --username YOUR_REDDIT_NAME and paste the output block. It formats everything: district, cases screened, hits, hit rate, top attorneys. One command, one copy/paste.
There's a leaderboard in the repo. Right now it's just me and two districts. First person to screen a new district gets on the board. First person to find a district with a 5%+ hit rate gets the top spot. First person to crack 100K cases screened. It's all public government data, you're not hacking anything, you're exporting a CSV from a federal website and running a Python script against it.
If you're the type who likes running scripts against messy public data and seeing what falls out, this is that.
Python devs who like public data projects. If you've ever scraped government data, done FOIA analysis, or built tools against public records, same energy, federal court data. Also useful for journalists, legal aid orgs, or anyone who thinks the justice system should be able to do basic arithmetic.
Nothing else does this. The court system itself charges per document and has no analytics. Commercial legal research platforms cost hundreds a month and don't check for this. This reads free public exports, runs locally, costs $0.
Repo: https://github.com/ilikemath9999/bankruptcy-discharge-screener
- Flair: "I Made This" or project showcase
- Timing: Weekday morning US time
- Tone: Natural follow-up. You're scaling up and asking for hands.
- If asked "which districts did you test?": "I'd rather not say yet, want to see what other people find independently so there's no selection bias."
- If asked "what attorneys are you finding?": "That's what I want the map to answer. Run it on your district and you'll see yours."
- If asked "why not just publish your data?": "Because then you're trusting my data. I'd rather you generate your own. That's the whole point, independent replication."
- If someone offers to build a web frontend or dashboard: say yes. That's the kind of contribution that scales this.
- If someone asks about your connection: "I'm a debtor who got curious about whether my experience was normal. The data was public and the math was simple."
- Do NOT mention: any firm, attorney, case number, court name, personal details, the word "mill," or the word "surveillance." Don't use the statute number (1328(f)) in the post body, describe what it does instead.