If you have decided to file for bankruptcy, you may be wondering if you can include any legal fees or attorney's fees in your bankruptcy discharge. While there are some circumstances where it may be possible to do this, it is not recommended. However, if you know you are so far down and out financially that there is no alternative but to include these debts in your bankruptcy, here are a few things you should know about what you can and cannot include.

What You Cannot Include

There are plenty of legal fees and lawyer fees you cannot include in a bankruptcy filing. These include any fees that the court has already assigned to you under a reduced fee structure, or for which the county has already forwarded to the state revenue service for collections. You also cannot include the fees and charges of your bankruptcy lawyer, otherwise you can probably kiss his or her assistance goodbye before your bankruptcy hearing even begins. You cannot dodge court-ordered back child support or back alimony payments either; these are meant to support your former spouse and children after your divorce and you agreed to these stipulations at the time of the divorce. Court-ordered restitution for deaths, injuries and destruction to private property also cannot be included as they are part of your punishment for things you should not have done.

What You Can Include

What you can include in your bankruptcy filing are any court fees for document filing (other than your bankruptcy filing), legal fees for services rendered that you feel were not rendered to your satisfaction, traffic tickets (in some states when the amounts exceed a certain dollar level) and any fees for representation which you did not agree to or request (e.g., your former spouse hires a lawyer to represent an adolescent child in court and did not give you any say in the matter regarding who would be hired and how much it would cost you if you hired someone).

Many of these legal fees may be contested by the lawyers or courts that charged you with them, so you may need a small claims lawyer to back you up in your decisions to place these debts on your bankruptcy paperwork. You may also have to prove why you cannot pay them IF your argument for why you feel you do not have to pay them is dismissed. Your bankruptcy lawyer can help you decide which of these may be worth the hassle to include on your bankruptcy documents. To learn more, contact a law firm like O'Connor Mikita & Davidson LLC.