My articles are my opinions, and not legal advice. I am a Judgment Broker, and am not a lawyer. If you ever need any legal advice or a strategy to use, please contact a lawyer.
Attorneys are important experts that are often, however not always, appropriate choices to recover specific judgments. Judgment recovery can often be difficult and time-consuming. When an attorney is qualified and right for your judgment, they can really help. Attorneys are especially helpful for difficult recovery situations, to manage all or part of your judgment recovery project.
Most attorneys are experts at winning the lawsuits that create judgments, and most do not recover judgments. With most attorneys, winning court cases is usually a lot more interesting than enforcing judgments. When the right judgment situation meets the right judgment recovery attorney, magic (recovering money from your judgment debtor) can happen.
When your judgment debtor has assets, yet is absolutely determined not to pay you, hiring a collection attorney can sometimes intimidate your judgment debtor, to find the money to pay or settle your judgment. Usually, hiring an expert collection attorney to recover your judgment, will save you a lot of hassle and stress.
While hiring a collection lawyer can cost you a lot of money, with their retainer and hefty hourly fees, sometimes a lawyer is the right choice to recover your judgment. Ideally, you might find a lawyer that would work for, at least partially, on a contingency basis. Unfortunately, most judgments are not strong enough to interest pure contingency collection lawyers. Collection lawyers will often work on a contingency basis, if your judgment is large and your judgment debtor has a lot of assets.
Usually, the larger the judgment and your judgment debtor’s available assets are, the more sense it makes to retain an attorney. In addition to making sure your judgment debtor has sufficient assets to at least partially repay your judgment, the most chance for successful recovery, is when you retain the right attorney for your judgment situation.
How do you find the right collection lawyer for your judgment? Usually, when you want to find a lawyer, it is a good idea to start with the local State Bar for your state or county, or get a referral from a friend, another trusted lawyer, or a judgment broker. The ideal collection attorney is one who has successfully recovered judgments before, where the post-judgment recovery situations were similar to that of your judgment and judgment debtor. In many states, the rules of professional conduct require attorneys to put their client’s interests ahead of their own.
You do not always need an attorney to recover a judgment. You can recover a judgment yourself, sell it for pennies on the dollar, or assign it to a judgment enforcer; however sometimes retaining an attorney (who is by definition an expert) makes the most sense.