subject: What Do You Do When Your Judgment Enforcer Disappears? [print this page] For decades, judgment enforcers have provided an important role assisting people that want their judgments recovered, when their judgment situations didn't interest pure contingency attorneys. When a person isn't a lawyer, they cannot represent someone else, and for that reason judgments are assigned to non-attorney judgment recovery specialists. This article is my opinion and is not, legal advice. I am a judgment broker, and not a lawyer. If you ever need legal advice or a strategy to use, please contact an attorney.
Many judgment enforcers are professional and responsive, and either will try to collect your judgment, or on request will be inclined to assign it back to you if they haven't any current or future plans to enforce your judgment.
However in our crummy economy, many recovery specialists are flaking out. What can you do when your judgment enforcer flakes, disappears, or has done nothing with your judgment and refuses to discuss the topic of returning it to you? The answer may be to try to "rescue" the judgment by undoing the assignment to an unresponsive or flaking judgment enforcer.
Before you look for a judgment rescue and enforcement answer, or before spending any money or time trying to rescue your judgment, it's important to rule out hopelessly broke or bankrupt debtor situations. The more hopeless the debtor situation is, the less important it is to get the judgment returned to you.
There is usually at least 2 sides to every story, and often the judgment enforcer will have good reasons for not assigning back your judgment. For example, when they spent a bunch of time and money on your debtor who seemed to have no observable assets, and the recovery specialist has filed liens on property, and their plans are to wait years for the debtor to inherit a parent's property. Another example might be when there is another judgment creditor's prior wage garnishment already in progress, which will be finished soon, and the recovery specialist is waiting for a future opportunity to make another wage levy attempt.
When the judgment situation seems hopeless, most professional judgment recovery specialists will return the judgment back to you upon request. I have seen judgment situations where an enforcer assigned the judgment back because it appeared hopeless, a second recovery specialist took it, and eventually also returned it saying it was hopeless, then a 3rd enforcer had the judgment assigned to them, and they collected the full judgment amount in six months.
To get the judgment back, it is very reasonable to offer to pay your judgment recovery specialist their recorded court-related costs, and perhaps something more, to get your judgment returned. When you can locate the enforcer, try to work out some deal with them. If nothing else works, and you cannot find the recovery specialist, or they are not reasonable on the concept of returning your judgment to you, the solution may be to try to undo the assignment of your judgment at the same court that you first won the judgment. That usually requires paying a lawyer, and always means time, money, and lots of documents.
This issue of flaky recovery specialists is getting so bad that some judgment recovery specialists are paying lawyers to unravel certain assignments of judgments, if the original judgment owner contacts them and agrees to later assign their judgment to the enforcer for recovery, or then permits a collection company's attorneys attempt to collect their judgment. Usually this is done with no, or little money required from the original judgment creditor, however the "rescuing enforcer" will recover their lawyer and judgment rescue-related expenses prior to dividing any future money that may be recovered.
It is easy to find and hire a lawyer to try to unravel an assignment of judgment, but that's expensive and means you still then need to look for a recovery solution. How might you find a "rescue recovery specialist" who uses their lawyers to rescue, and then recovers your judgment on a contingency basis? Rescuing a judgment away from flaky recovery specialists, using lawyers retained by new companies is fairly new.
The right way to locate a contingency judgment rescue answer is to contact a judgment broker, because they work with judgment experts who use lawyers, in every state. Another way is to look on the web and email enforcers until you locate an enforcer who may be able to help. Note that over time, some missing judgment enforcers return and do the right thing, or sometimes you can find them later, and then some, when asked politely, will do the right thing.
