James H. Cossitt is Of Counsel to Gribble, Boles, Stewart & Witosky, back in his hometown of Des Moines, IA and splits his time about 50/50 between Des Moines (summer & fall) and the Flathead Valley of NW Montana (winter & spring).
He practiced in Kalispell, Mont., from 1999-2022 in the areas of bankruptcy & workouts, business & commercial litigation, real estate, landlord / tenant, secured transactions and construction law. He no longer practices in Montana.
He began his career in insolvency law as a bankruptcy attorney with the FDIC in Des Moines, Iowa, served as a chapter 7 panel trustee in the N.D. of Iowa from 1988-95 and as a chapter 11 trustee in the W.D. of Michigan from 1997 to 2000. Mr. Cossitt is admitted to practice in the state and federal courts in Montana, Colorado, Michigan and Iowa, is board-certified by the American Board of Certification in both Business (2005) & Consumer (1995) Bankruptcy Law. He is a member of the American Bar Association, National Association of Bankruptcy Trustees, National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys and a lifetime member of the American Bankruptcy Institute. In addition, he is the Montana editor of West Group’s Bankruptcy Exemption Manual.
As chair of the Task Force on Attorney Discipline’s Best Practices Working Group of the Ad Hoc Committee on Bankruptcy Court Structure and Insolvency Process, Mr. Cossitt supervised the publication of the “Working Paper: Best Practices for Debtors’ Attorneys”, 64 Bus. Law 79 (2008), which was a follow up to an earlier Report by the Task force, entitled “Attorney liability under section 707(b)(4) of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005”, 61 Bus. Law. 697 (2006).
A frequent speaker to professional and trade groups on bankruptcy and related topics, Mr. Cossitt was a member of a task force of US bankruptcy judges, law professors and others who consulted with the Slovak Parliament and research institutes in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 1993 on drafting a new bankruptcy law and the transition to a market economy. He served as an invited lecturer at a Russian Bankruptcy School sponsored by the Iowa State University Center for International Agricultural Finance, held in Ames, Iowa, in 1995. Mr. Cossitt received his B.A., with distinction, in 1982 from Iowa State University and his J.D. in 1986 from the University of Iowa College of Law.