Following a national trend, bankruptcy filings for the 12- month period ending June 30 dropped 6.2 percent in Kansas compared with the same period a year before. But lawyers and others who specialize in helping people with their debts don't think it's because clients have put away their credit cards or stopped facing layoffs, medical bills, divorces and other life events that pummel bank accounts. Instead, most say the numbers probably are down because so many people rushed to file before bankruptcy rules changed last October. Overall filings declined from 17,342 in the period ending in June 2005 to 16,272 in the period ending in June 2006. "Anybody who had been thinking about it did it before October, so those people didn't trickle in over the last year," Wichita bankruptcy lawyer Terry Stephens said.