Filing in the Los Angeles Division (Roybal Federal Building)

The Los Angeles Division sits in the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building at 255 East Temple Street downtown and hears cases from most of Los Angeles County, including Beverly Hills, the Westside, the South Bay and the San Gabriel Valley. It's the largest division in the busiest bankruptcy district in the country. Most of our clients file here, and most of them never see the building.

The building on Temple Street

Roybal is the tall federal building in the Civic Center, a block from City Hall, with the bankruptcy clerk's office and the courtrooms on the upper floors. Twenty years ago a bankruptcy lawyer spent a lot of mornings there: filing paper petitions at the counter, sitting in the crowded 341 rooms on the lower floor, waiting for a calendar to be called. Almost none of that happens now.

Petitions are filed electronically from our office on Wilshire Boulevard. The 341 meeting has been on Zoom since June 2024. Routine hearings are mostly remote. The building is still where your case lives, in the sense that your judge sits there and your file is there, but for an ordinary Chapter 7 you could complete the whole case without ever finding the parking structure.

Who files here

Los Angeles County is split between two divisions, and the line is drawn by city and zip code rather than by anything obvious. As a rough rule, the basin files here: Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City, downtown, Koreatown, the Westside generally, the South Bay from Inglewood to Long Beach, the Eastside, and the San Gabriel Valley out to Pomona. The San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley go to Woodland Hills instead.

A few cities near the line surprise people. We check the court's assignment list against your address before filing, because a petition filed in the wrong division gets transferred, and a transfer costs weeks.

The 341 meeting, from your kitchen

About a month after filing you'll get a notice with a Zoom link, a meeting ID and a time. The Los Angeles panel trustees run their calendars in blocks, often six or eight debtors in an hour, so you'll wait in a virtual room while the cases ahead of you go. When yours is called, you turn on the camera, hold your driver's license and Social Security card up to it, and answer questions under oath for something like eight minutes. Naomi is on the call with you, from her own screen.

The questions are about the schedules: is everything listed, is it accurate, have you transferred anything, do you expect a tax refund, does anyone owe you money. The trustees here have done thousands of these. They are brisk, not hostile. What they don't like is a debtor who's clearly hearing a question for the first time, which is why we do a preparation call the week before.

The trustee panel

The Los Angeles Division has the largest panel of Chapter 7 trustees in the district, appointed by the U.S. Trustee for Region 16 and assigned to cases in rotation. Because it's a big panel, the habits vary more here than anywhere else. Some trustees want bank statements for the full six-month lookback sent to them a week before the meeting. Some ask every debtor about cryptocurrency. One or two look hard at vehicle values and will ask for a dealer quote if the schedule seems low.

Chapter 13 cases go to one of the standing Chapter 13 trustees for the division, whose office receives your plan payments and distributes them. That office has its own procedures for how mortgage payments flow through a plan and how it wants business income reported, and a plan drafted to their preferences confirms faster than one that isn't.

Local practice you'll notice

The judges in this division publish individual procedures, and they differ. One judge holds reaffirmation hearings on a set day and expects the debtor on camera with a current budget. Another rarely sets them at all if the budget shows the payment is affordable. Chapter 13 confirmation hearings here move quickly when the trustee has recommended confirmation and slowly when there's an objection, and the difference is usually whether the plan was drafted with this trustee's office in mind.

If a hearing does require you in person, it's on an upper floor of Roybal, there's security at the entrance like any federal building, and the parking is on the street or in the structures along Alameda. Wear what you'd wear to a job interview. It's rarely more than twenty minutes in the courtroom. Naomi is there.

Filing here from Beverly Hills

Our office is at 9454 Wilshire Boulevard, on the Penthouse Floor, about twenty minutes from Temple Street when the 10 is behaving. That proximity mattered more when filing was on paper. Today it means Naomi can be at Roybal in person when a case needs it, and that after roughly 2,400 cases most of them have been in front of this division's trustees and judges.

The rest of the Central District, and how the five divisions divide the region, is on our page on which bankruptcy court will hear your case. If you already know you're in Los Angeles County and want to get started, book a free video consultation. You won't need to come downtown for that either.

From Naomi

I still go to Roybal, but it's for a hearing maybe once or twice a month now, not every morning. The thing that hasn't changed is the trustees. When I get the assignment notice and see a name, I know within a second whether we're sending six months of bank statements in advance or whether the questions will be about the car. That knowledge is the whole difference between a nervous ten minutes on Zoom and a calm six. It's what I'm actually selling. The building is just the building.

Questions people ask about this

Written and reviewed by Naomi Reyes-Ashford, Certified Specialist in Bankruptcy Law, State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization. Last reviewed September 2026.