From: New Philadelphia, Ohio

Our September 2008 Member of the Month, John Bates is a solo practitioner in New Philadelphia, Ohio, (a 30-minute drive from Canton) with a practice limited to consumer bankruptcy law. He serves the residents of eight counties in the northern and southern districts of Ohio.

John is well-known by NACBA members for his “Guide to Exemption Selection for Nonresident Debtors,” which he created to assist NACBA and other consumer bankruptcy attorneys in determining what exemptions are available to their clients, particularly clients who must look to the law of a non-forum state to answer that question. This guide has been published in Norton on Bankruptcy and will be available in West’s Bankruptcy Exemption Manual. John also created a website – www.ExemptionsExpress.com – which provides the same assistance online.

John graduated in 1967 magna cum laude from Oberlin College with a degree in music, with additional studies in economics and mathematics. He then attended the University of Pittsburgh under an Economics fellowship for a year and then joined the VISTA program, where he was assigned to work in Arizona with low-income credit unions. John graduated first in his class from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in 1972 and was chosen outstanding graduating student by the faculty. After graduating, he went to work with the Maricopa County Legal Services program, having been awarded a Reginald Heber Smith fellowship.

In 1974, he left the legal services program and with his partner, Van O’Steen, founded one of the first legal clinics in the nation in Phoenix. He was a party to the case that established lawyers’ constitutional right to advertise in 1977.

He continued in private practice until 1980, when he went to work as an assistant attorney general in the financial fraud division of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office handling racketeering, consumer fraud, bankruptcy, banking, and insurance cases. In 1986, he returned to private practice in Phoenix, handling consumer and commercial litigation.

In 1990, John returned to the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and earned an LL.M in commercial law in 1992. He is the author of Continued Use of Goods After UCC Rejection or Revocation of Acceptance: The Code Rule Revealed, Reviewed, and Revised, 25 Rutgers L.J. 1 (1993)(lead article).

In 1992, John became a managing attorney with Southeastern Ohio Legal Services, New Philadelphia, Ohio, where he represented indigent clients in the local courts and taught law and computer courses at the local branch of Kent State University. In 1998, he went into private practice in New Philadelphia, and soon after that, limited his practice to consumer bankruptcy cases.

John has been a member of NACBA since 2003 and was a panelist at our 2007 Convention in Hollywood on the subject of exemption selection. He says, “I consider NACBA to be an essential part of my success as a bankruptcy lawyer.”