398
Opinion of the Court
the lack of any prejudice to the debtor or to the interests of efficient judicial administration, combined with the good faith of respondents and their counsel, weigh strongly in favor of permitting the tardy claim.
In assessing the culpability of respondents' counsel, we give little weight to the fact that counsel was experiencing upheaval in his law practice at the time of the bar date. We do, however, consider significant that the notice of the bar date provided by the Bankruptcy Court in this case was outside the ordinary course in bankruptcy cases. As the Court of Appeals noted, ordinarily the bar date in a bankruptcy case should be prominently announced and accompanied by an explanation of its significance. See 943 F. 2d, at 678. We agree with the court that the "peculiar and inconspicuous placement of the bar date in a notice regarding a creditors['] meeting," without any indication of the significance of the bar date, left a "dramatic ambiguity" in the notification. Ibid.15 This is not to say, of course, that respondents' counsel was not remiss in failing to apprehend the notice. To be sure, were there any evidence of prejudice to petitioner or to judicial administration in this case, or any indication at all of bad faith, we could not say that the Bankruptcy Court abused its discretion in declining to find the neglect to be "excusable." In the absence of such a showing, however, we
15 Indeed, one commentator has warned expressly of the deficiency in the method of notification employed by the Bankruptcy Court here: "Prior to the adoption of the present bankruptcy rules some bankruptcy courts placed a time to close the receipt of claims in chapter 11 in the notice sent to the listed creditors for the first meeting of creditors. This practice should be strongly discouraged. It conflicts with some of the factual circumstances giving rise to a claim in chapter 11 and can ambush unwitting creditors. Since creditors are notorious for failing to read all of the boilerplate language in the xeroxed form distributed as the notice of the first meeting of creditors, counsel for creditors will be wise to double check and ask for a prompt receipt of the notice from the client or examine the notice on file in the particular bankruptcy case." R. Aaron, Bankruptcy Law Fundamentals § 8.02[7], p. 8-21 (rev. ed. 1991).
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