Nicholls

MEMORANDUM *

Debtor-Appellants Christopher D. Nic-holls and Kristine J. Nicholls (the “Nic-holls”) appeal a decision of the district court accepting jurisdiction over Creditor-Appellees John F. Buchan and Gloria Bu-chan’s (the “Buchans”) appeal of the decision of the bankruptcy court. We vacate for lack of jurisdiction and remand to the bankruptcy court for further proceedings.

I

The bankruptcy court issued a judgment on April 26, 2000, awarding $574,167 plus $3,000 to the Buchans on the merits of their claim, subtracting $16,000 to be paid by them in sanctions, and simultaneously awarding $138,921.51 in attorneys’ fees to the Nicholls. This judgment was modified by the court sua sponte on June 12, 2000, reducing the amount of attorneys’ fees awarded individually to the *732 Nicholls to $55,000 and reserving the remainder of the fees to their estate. The Buchans appealed to the district court on June 22, 2000. The Nicholls argued that because no aspect of the modified judgment was appealed and because it did not disadvantage the Buchans, the district court was required to compute the jurisdictional filing deadline from the date of the entry of the original judgment. Because the…

I respectfully dissent, believing that the district court had jurisdiction to consider the Buchans’ appeal of the decision of the bankruptcy court. The district court properly used that jurisdiction to correct substantive errors, which the majority’s erroneous ruling on jurisdiction instead necessarily leaves uncorrected.

The record taken as a whole is ambiguous, and it is not unreasonable to conclude, as the district court apparently did, that the order appealed from contracted rather *734 than expanded the benefits for the Bu-chans’ individually, the opposite of the conclusion upon which the majority relies. I agree with the majority that this ambiguity and divergence of our views depends entirely on whether the first order of the Bankruptcy Court, which awarded $138,921.51 in attorney’s fees to “Defendants Christopher and Kristine Nicholls,” meant the Nicholls individually, as the majority reads it, or their estate in bankruptcy, as I believe the district court reasonably read it. I believe that the district court’s reading not only accords with reality as perceived by the parties at the time of the first order, but also sustains the district court’s proper exercise of its…