When a client makes an appointment to collect on money owed by an individual debtor, the process appears to be relatively straightforward. You meet your creditor client, send a demand letter, issue, serve, and filed a Statement of Claim (or a Plaintiff’s Claim, depending on the amount at issue) and wait twenty days for regular service, or 25 days for alternative service. The debtor may defend against the Claim, in which case you will continue with litigation, or they may not defend against the Claim, as occurs in many cases. If your evidence is good as to their debt, you should ultimately find yourself holding a judgment as against the debtor.
Many of the steps to obtain a judgment are relatively straightforward. Most of the time, you may easily be able to explain each step to your client. However, while obtaining the judgment feels like a solid win for your creditor client, the most difficult work is just beginning. Once you have a judgment, in order to recover any debt, you must enforce the judgment. The good news is that there are a number of ways to enforce a judgment against a debtor, depending on the information that you possess.
If you already have information about the debtor, you can move to enforce as soon as you have the default judgment, using one or more of the enforcement mechanisms below. The enforcement mechanisms referenced in this article are used to enforce judgments against an individual debtor; if you are looking to enforce a judgment against a sole proprietor or an organization, there are a number of further methods, and different rules that are beyond the scope of this article.
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