Chapter 11 in Florida: 6 Differences Among the State's Three Districts

A Naples company that files chapter 11 will have its hearings in Fort Myers, and the Fort Myers courthouse will not take its papers. That is the Middle District of Florida's own description of its Fort Myers Division, and it is the first local fact for anyone looking for a business bankruptcy lawyer in Southwest Florida.

The Code is national. Chapter 11 in Florida confirms plans under the same section 1129 that governs a case in Maine. The differences sit in the three district courts' own rules and offices, and in two state laws that apply from Pensacola to Key West.

1. Three Districts, Each With Its Own Map

28 U.S.C. 89 provides that "Florida is divided into three judicial districts to be known as the Northern, Middle, and Southern Districts of Florida." The Northern District holds court at Gainesville, Marianna, Panama City, Pensacola, and Tallahassee. The Middle District sits at Fernandina, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, Live Oak, Ocala, Orlando, Saint Petersburg, and Tampa. The Southern District, which takes Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, Monroe, and five other counties, sits at Fort Lauderdale, Fort Pierce, Key West, Miami, and West Palm Beach.

The bankruptcy courts divide those maps again. The Northern District's bankruptcy court has four divisions (Tallahassee, Pensacola, Gainesville, and Panama City), and its Tallahassee courthouse is at 110 East Park Avenue, Suite 100. The Middle District's bankruptcy divisions are Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, and Fort Myers. The Southern District's Miami courthouse is the C. Clyde Atkins United States Courthouse, 301 North Miami Avenue, Room 150, where members of the public may not bring in cell phones.

2. Southwest Florida Has a Bankruptcy Courthouse Without a Bankruptcy Clerk

The Fort Myers Division serves Charlotte, Collier, De Soto, Glades, Hendry, and Lee counties from the United States Courthouse and Federal Building at 2110 First Street, Fort Myers. Sarasota, one county north, belongs to the Tampa Division. The court's locations page is direct about what the Fort Myers building lacks.

"The Fort Myers Division does not have staffed Bankruptcy Clerk's Office. The District Court's Clerk's Office at the Fort Myers Courthouse does not accept filings in bankruptcy cases."

Papers filed by parties without a lawyer must go by hand or mail to the Tampa clerk, at 801 N. Florida Avenue, Suite 555. For a company the point is narrower than it looks. An LLC or corporation may appear in federal court only through licensed counsel, a rule the Supreme Court described in Rowland v. California Men's Colony as settled "for the better part of two centuries," and its lawyer files through the court's electronic system. The Tampa window matters most to the owner who files a personal case without one.

An owner in Immokalee, filing alone, mails the petition to Tampa.

3. The Middle District Asks for the Whole Business in Three Business Days

Middle District Local Rule 2081-1 requires a debtor in possession, "Within the earlier of three business days following the petition date, or the date that the debtor-in-possession first files a motion requesting affirmative relief," to file a Chapter 11 Case Management Summary. Its contents read like the first hour of a turnaround consultant's engagement compressed onto a court form: a description of the business and its locations, the reasons for filing, insiders' salaries for the prior year, annual gross revenues, the amounts owed to priority, secured, and unsecured creditors, the assets, the employees and the wages owed them, the "status of the debtor's payroll and sales tax obligations," the "anticipated emergency relief to be requested within the first 14 days," and "the debtor's strategic objectives, i.e., refinancing, cramdown, surrender/sale of assets or business."

That last item asks a company to state its strategy on day three, in a public filing its funders will read. The summary works the way a building permit taped inside a contractor's front window works: required, visible from the sidewalk, and read by everyone who has a reason to decide whether to walk in.

The rule continues. Small business debtors and "Subchapter V Debtors as defined in 11 U.S.C. § 1182" must file, beyond the official Small Business Monthly Operating Report, a monthly Schedule of Receipts and Disbursements and a check register for each bank account. Non-affiliate employees may be paid postpetition salary in the ordinary course, but an "Affiliate Officer" needs court approval first. Money withheld from employees or collected as taxes must be kept in a separate account. Listed emergency motions "will be scheduled for hearing within three business days, if reasonably possible."

For a business whose receipts are swept each day by merchant cash advance debits, the check-register requirement will show every one of those debits (and every transfer between accounts, and every payment to an insider, in a form the U.S. trustee, the Subchapter V trustee, and the funders' lawyers can reconcile against the bank statements without asking the debtor for anything) on a monthly schedule.

4. Four Trustee Offices, One Region, Headquarters in Atlanta

Region 21 of the U.S. Trustee Program covers Georgia, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands from Atlanta. Florida's field offices are in Tampa (501 East Polk Street, Suite 1200), Orlando, Miami, and Tallahassee, where the office shares 110 East Park Avenue with the Northern District's bankruptcy court.

5. The Northern District Still Runs Subchapter V Under an Interim Order

In February 2020, when the Small Business Reorganization Act took effect, the Northern District's Chief Judge signed Administrative Order No. 20-001, an "Interim Order Adopting Rules for Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019." The court's page states that "The Interim Rules shall remain in effect until further order of the court," and it still carries a notice about the June 2024 sunset of the higher Subchapter V debt limit, which gives the post-sunset figure as $3,024,725.

That figure has since moved. Under the Judicial Conference's adjustment effective April 1, 2025, the small business debtor ceiling is $3,424,000, and a bill to restore a $7.5 million limit was moving through Congress in 2026. Whether a court's page, left as it was, still tells an owner the truth is a question worth asking of every page on this list, including this one.

6. Two State Laws Apply From Pensacola to Key West

Florida opted out of the federal exemptions; Fla. Stat. 222.20 provides that residents "shall not be entitled to the federal exemptions provided in s. 522(d)." The state constitution's homestead, in Article X, section 4(a)(1), protects property "owned by a natural person" by area rather than value: up to one hundred sixty acres of contiguous land outside a municipality, or one-half acre inside one, limited to the residence of the owner or the owner's family. Taxes, purchase money, and improvement or labor debts on the property are excepted. The company itself has no homestead.

Federal law trims the acreage for recent purchases. Under 11 U.S.C. 522(p), a debtor using state exemptions cannot exempt more than $214,000 (the figure effective April 1, 2025) of homestead interest acquired in the 1,215 days before filing, apart from equity rolled over from an earlier Florida home.

The second law is the Florida Commercial Financing Disclosure Law, Fla. Stat. 559.961 through 559.9615, which applies to commercial financing transactions consummated on or after January 1, 2024. It excludes banks, transactions over $500,000, and providers doing no more than five such transactions in the state in a year, among others; it requires written disclosure "at or before consummation" and bars brokers from most advance fees. Enforcement belongs to the Attorney General alone, with fines of $500 per incident up to $20,000, rising to $1,000 per incident up to $50,000 after written notice. "A violation of this part does not affect the enforceability or validity of the underlying commercial financing transaction," and the law "does not create a private right of action."

A missing disclosure, then, is a complaint to Tallahassee and not a defense in Fort Myers.

Where a Florida Owner Starts

Some Florida companies belong in front of a bankruptcy judge now, and for them the right call is to a lawyer admitted in the correct district. Others still have room to negotiate. Delancey Street negotiates business debt and is not a law firm; it does not file cases or give legal advice, and its first look at a company's advances and other business debt costs nothing and stays private, and a question that turns legal goes to independently licensed counsel. Which of those two groups a company belongs to is the first thing worth learning, and the map above does not answer it.