Preference law targets the fairness problem created when a struggling debtor pays some creditors shortly before filing bankruptcy while others go unpaid. To recover a payment as preferential, a trustee must generally show it was made to or for the benefit of a creditor, on account of an antecedent debt, while the debtor was insolvent, within the applicable lookback period, and that it let the creditor receive more than it would have received in the hypothetical Chapter 7 distribution. Insolvency is presumed during the 90-day period immediately preceding filing.

Several defenses can defeat an otherwise-qualifying preference claim. The ordinary course of business defense protects payments made and received according to normal business terms between the parties or consistent with industry norms. The contemporaneous exchange for new value defense protects payments intended as, and that were in fact, a substantially contemporaneous exchange for new value given to the debtor. The subsequent new value defense credits a creditor for new value it extended to the debtor after receiving an otherwise-preferential payment.

Because preference exposure depends heavily on exactly when a payment falls relative to the 90-day or one-year lookback boundary, and on whether the payment pattern with a given creditor looks ordinary or anomalous, Juricratic models it as a lookback-window dial, letting a user test how sensitive the total clawback exposure is to small shifts in the filing date or the payment timeline.

A trustee reconstructing a debtor's pre-petition payment history sorts transfers by recipient and date against the 90-day and one-year windows to identify preference targets, while creditors who received payments in that window gather ordinary-course documentation — historical invoice-to-payment timing, industry payment norms — early, since that evidence is central to the most commonly successful defense.