Divisional Office Patterns

Federal bankruptcy courts are organized by district, but each district contains multiple divisional offices. Our corpus has 204 unique divisional offices. District-level aggregation hides systematic variation between courthouse divisions.

204

Divisional offices in our corpus

36% – 93%

Discharge rate range across top-30 offices

94.5%

Highest Ch.13 mix in any office (innbk-2)

4.0%

Lowest Ch.13 mix in any office (mabk-4)

Why this matters. Two offices in the same district can have radically different case mixes and outcomes. The Eastern District of Missouri has offices with 27% Ch.13 mix and others with 54%. Researchers using district-level data may miss this. The PACER case_office field is opaque (just an integer), but the distribution of cases across offices is itself informative.

Top 20 divisional offices by volume

Court	Office	Total	Ch.7	Ch.13	Ch.13 %	Discharge rate
mowbk	4	30,430	13,773	15,990	52.5%	69.0%
txsbk	4	29,642	11,187	18,220	61.5%	57.4%
flsbk	1	22,859	11,753	8,639	37.8%	65.6%
ksbk	2	22,344	10,596	11,228	50.3%	75.4%
flsbk	9	10,699	3,853	6,301	58.9%	69.5%
flsbk	0	10,374	5,312	4,330	41.7%	64.9%
ksbk	5	9,424	2,793	6,550	69.5%	71.5%
ilnbk	1	7,116	4,484	2,494	35.0%	75.6%
ksbk	6	6,999	4,465	2,416	34.5%	83.1%
mowbk	6	6,384	4,505	1,739	27.2%	87.1%
ohnbk	1	4,168	3,223	266	6.4%	77.5%
cacbk	2	2,557	2,134	377	14.7%	86.6%
cacbk	6	2,032	1,811	218	10.7%	91.8%
nyebk	1	1,055	991	57	5.4%	93.4%
insbk	1	999	229	760	76.1%	46.9%
njbk	2	1,202	369	784	65.2%	36.4%
tnwbk	2	1,304	451	812	62.3%	43.5%

Download the data (CC BY 4.0):
divisional_offices.csv divisional_offices_outcomes.csv

What jumps out

The Ch.13-heavy offices have lower discharge rates. innbk-1 (76% Ch.13 mix) discharges 47%; nyebk-1 (5% Ch.13 mix) discharges 93%. This is mostly mechanical — Ch.13 has a 5-year completion bar — but the gap is wider than chapter-mix alone explains.
Same-district variation. Within Kansas: office 2 discharges 75%, office 5 discharges 71.5%, office 6 discharges 83.1%. Same federal judges, same local rules, different outcomes.
Some offices are functionally Ch.7-only. ohnbk office 1: 6.4% Ch.13 mix. nyebk office 1: 5.4%. mabk office 4: 4.0%.
And some are functionally Ch.13-only. innbk office 2: 94.5% Ch.13. ksbk office 5: 69.5%.

Methodology

Source: 220,037 federal bankruptcy cases. Filtered for cases with non-null case_office. Office numbers are PACER-internal codes within each district; correspondence to physical courthouse divisions can be inferred from court websites but is not standardized. "Discharge rate" sums all dispositions starting with "Discharge" excluding "Withheld", "Denied", "Revoked", "Waived"; "Dismissed rate" sums all dispositions starting with "Dismissed".

← Back to viz hub | View on GitHub