The public record

Her cases made the law books.

When a judge writes a published opinion, the fight mattered. Angie's clients have put more than 40 of them in the books since 1995, from the Augusta bankruptcy court to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Here is the record.

The cases of Angela McElroy-Magruder
Board Certified in Consumer Bankruptcy Law by the American Board of Certification

Three decades of published decisions

The first is from May 1995. The most recent came down in February 2026. That is thirty-one years of fights that ended up in the books.

Four courts

The bankruptcy court's Augusta, Dublin, Statesboro and Savannah divisions, the federal district court, the Georgia Court of Appeals, and the Eleventh Circuit.

The other side has names

Mortgage servicers, payday lenders, car dealers, the Georgia Department of Revenue, and the United States. She has published decisions against all of them.

Facing one of these fights yourself?

Call the Augusta office, or text if that is easier. The consultation is free and it stays between us.

Call 706-724-6000 Text

Why this page exists

Anyone can say they fight. The books say who did.

Every case below is a real decision by a real judge, findable by its citation in any law library. They are listed the way lawyers cite them so that anyone, including another lawyer, can go check. No summaries have been inflated and no outcomes are claimed that the opinions do not support.

Some of these cases her clients won. Some they lost. That is what thirty years of taking hard questions to court actually looks like, and Angie would rather show you the real record than a highlight reel.

Three fights worth telling

The stories behind three of them.

The dealer who kept the car

Powell v. Shorty's Used Cars (In re Powell), 555 B.R. 907 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2016)

A used car dealer repossessed Todd Powell's vehicle days before he filed Chapter 13, then refused to give it back. Federal law required its immediate return. Angie took the dealer to court, and the judge found the dealer had violated the automatic stay and awarded her client $7,300 in damages.

If a creditor grabbed your car or started taking money out of your paycheck on the way into a bankruptcy, this is a fight she has already had, and won, in this exact courthouse.

The trustee who said the exemption was too big

Meredith v. Antman (In re Antman), 665 B.R. 522 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2024)

A Chapter 13 trustee objected when Angie claimed Georgia's doubled homestead exemption to protect her client's home equity, arguing the client's husband needed his own stake in the property for the double protection to apply. The court read the statute Angie's way and overruled the objection. Her client kept the protection. Two years later the legislature raised those same exemptions again, which makes this exact question live for every Georgia homeowner filing today.

The bank that wanted out of punitive damages

Beasley v. Sea Island Bank (In re Beasley), 2006 Bankr. LEXIS 5123 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2006)

A bank facing a stay-violation claim asked the court to throw out the punitive damages piece before trial. The court refused, and the possibility of punitive damages stayed on the table. Creditors behave differently when that door is open, which is the point of knowing how to keep it open.

The Eleventh Circuit

Two of her cases reached the federal court of appeals.

In Sys. & Servs. Techs. v. Davis (In re Davis), 314 F.3d 567 (11th Cir. 2002), Angie represented the debtor in a published decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the federal appeals court over Georgia, Florida and Alabama. The counsel line of the published opinion reads: "For Davis, Ruby Lee, Appellee: McElroy, Angela, Attorney at Law, Augusta, GA."

And the case she litigated for her client in the Augusta bankruptcy court in Telfair v. First Union Mortgage Corp. (In re Telfair), 224 B.R. 243 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1998) went up on appeal and became a published Eleventh Circuit opinion that courts across the country still cite, more than twenty-five years later, on how mortgage companies must handle Chapter 13 payments.

Most bankruptcy work never leaves the trial court. Her clients' cases have shaped what the appeals court says the law is.

The mortgage fights

She has taken on most of the mortgage industry by name.

Mortgage companies are where her published record runs deepest. Fees that should never have been charged, escrow accounts that quietly swallowed payments, servicers that lost track of who owed what during a case. If a mortgage company is squeezing you right now, start with what bankruptcy can actually stop , then look at the names on this list.

Telfair v. First Union Mortgage Corp., 224 B.R. 243 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1998)
Clark v. Washington Mutual Home Loans, 299 B.R. 694 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2003)
Bryant v. Countrywide Home Loans, 2004 Bankr. LEXIS 1575 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2004)
Arsenault v. JP Morgan Chase Bank, 456 B.R. 627 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2011), and on appeal, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 128412 (S.D. Ga. 2012)
Best v. GMAC Mortgage, 2012 Bankr. LEXIS 3064 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2012)
Brown v. Branch Banking & Trust Co., 477 B.R. 915 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2012)
Moore v. BAC Home Loan Servicing, 477 B.R. 918 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2012)
Hand v. LaSalle Bank, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 201387 (S.D. Ga. 2013), and Hand v. ABN AMRO Mortgage Group, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 46181 (S.D. Ga. 2014)
Trudelle v. PHH Mortgage Corp., 2017 Bankr. LEXIS 3339 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2017)
Regions Mortgage v. Jackson, 294 Ga. App. 525 (2008)

The tax fights

She litigated tax debt against the government itself.

Whether taxes can be handled in bankruptcy is one of the questions clients ask most. Angie did not learn the answer from a seminar. In the Burke litigation she spent years fighting both the United States and the Georgia Department of Revenue over exactly that, and the courts published four decisions along the way.

Burke v. United States, 198 B.R. 412 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1996)
Burke v. Georgia, 200 B.R. 282 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1996)
Burke v. Georgia ex rel. Department of Revenue, 203 B.R. 493 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1996)
Burke v. Georgia Department of Revenue, 258 B.R. 310 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2001)

The lender fights

Payday lenders, finance companies and rent-to-own.

The businesses that make their money on people who are already struggling are the ones most worth watching closely in a bankruptcy. Her clients' cases against them include:

Pinkston v. Security Finance Corp., 183 B.R. 986 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1995)
Central Rents v. Johnson, 203 B.R. 498 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1996)
Davis-McGraw, Inc. v. Johnson, 247 B.R. 904 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1999)
Martin v. CitiFinancial, 387 B.R. 307 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2007), and Cloud v. CitiFinancial, 2013 Bankr. LEXIS 393 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2013)
Liberty Lending Services v. Canada, 293 Ga. App. 731 (2008)
Scott v. AmeriCash Loans, 608 B.R. 774 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2019)
Ford v. Quantum3 Group, 2015 Bankr. LEXIS 1512 and 1530 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2015)

She has also litigated against a military exchange. In Bareford v. AAFES, 2010 Bankr. LEXIS 3114 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2010), her client's case took on the Army & Air Force Exchange Service itself. If you serve at Fort Gordon and your debts include the STAR card or other on-post credit, she has been in that fight too, and she wrote a whole guide on what filing bankruptcy does and does not do to a security clearance.

And the rest

The record keeps going.

Am. Inv. Bank v. Clarke, 1996 Bankr. LEXIS 2052 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1996)
Pate v. Melvin Williams Manufactured Homes, 198 B.R. 841 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1996)
Cook v. Boardwalk Properties, 1999 Bankr. LEXIS 2105 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 1999)
Chambliss v. Oakwood Acceptance Corp., 315 B.R. 166 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2004)
In re Snow, 2005 Bankr. LEXIS 3592 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2005)
eCAST Settlement Corp. v. Campbell, 2007 Bankr. LEXIS 2850 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2007)
In re James, 358 B.R. 816 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2007)
In re Key, 465 B.R. 709 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2012)
Daniel v. Wheeler County State Bank, 2012 Bankr. LEXIS 2433 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2012)
In re Hughes, 2012 Bankr. LEXIS 3914 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2012)
In re Allen, 2013 Bankr. LEXIS 4416 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2013)
Aliff v. Resurgent Capital Services, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 62683 (S.D. Ga. 2015), and 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 2824 (S.D. Ga. 2017)
In re Moss, 2017 Bankr. LEXIS 2082 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2017)
In re Mullis, 2017 Bankr. LEXIS 2083 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2017)
In re Doolittle, 2018 Bankr. LEXIS 984 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2018)
Scott v. Sherman and related adversary work, 2019 Bankr. LEXIS 3522 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2019)
In re Callier, 2023 Bankr. LEXIS 2410 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2023)
In re Crosby, 2025 Bankr. LEXIS 1834 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. 2025), and 2026 Bankr. LEXIS 282 and 299 (Bankr. S.D. Ga. Feb. 3, 2026)

The Crosby decisions came down in February 2026. This is not a record from a long-ago career. She was in these books last winter and she will be in them again.

What it means for you

Why any of this matters to someone drowning in debt.

Fair question. If you are behind on the house and the phone will not stop ringing, a page of citations is not what you need. What you need is to get through a Chapter 7 or a Chapter 13 with the things you are trying to protect still yours.

So here is the connection. Most bankruptcy cases should be quiet, and yours probably will be. But the reason a mortgage servicer or a repo man thinks twice about cutting corners in her cases is that they can look her up and see what happened to the ones who did. A lawyer with a record in the books does not have to threaten anybody. The books do it for her.

Want to know what she would do with yours? Ask her. The consultation is free.

Your case will not be a law book fight

But your lawyer should be ready if it becomes one.

Most cases end quietly, with debts discharged and a fresh start. The record above is for the days things do not go quietly. Call the office or send a message through the contact page, and come talk it through.

Call 706-724-6000 Text

About Angie

Angela McElroy-Magruder

Angie has practiced bankruptcy and consumer law in Augusta since 1995 and has been Board Certified in Consumer Bankruptcy Law by the American Board of Certification since 2007. She meets clients in Augusta, Dublin and Statesboro.

Read her full background

About this list: compiled from the published decisions themselves as reported in the Bankruptcy Reporter, the Federal Reporter, the Georgia Appeals Reports and the LEXIS database, and verified August 2026. Where a decision is unpublished or reported only electronically, the LEXIS citation is given. Decisions are listed regardless of outcome.

Courts: U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Georgia; U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

This page provides general information about published court decisions in which Angela McElroy-Magruder appeared as counsel, and is not a guarantee, warranty or prediction of the outcome of any legal matter. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Reading this page does not create an attorney-client relationship.

We are a debt relief agency. We help people file for bankruptcy relief under the Bankruptcy Code.