subject: Who Should Recover Enormous Judgments? [print this page] I am not an attorney, I am a Judgment and Collection Agency Broker. This article is my opinion. If you need legal advice, please contact an attorney.
When judgment is used in this article, it means debts or judgments. When enforcer or recovery specialist is used, it means professionals in the debt or judgment recovery business, including attorneys.
Judgments are usually stronger than debts, and nearly all civil judgments for money begin life as a debt.
Many new judgment enforcers or owners are way too impressed by most large-dollar judgment face values. The size of a judgment has almost nothing to do with the chances that it will be recovered. The judgment debtor's situation is 96% of all judgment recoveries. An exception is really small judgments, because low dollar judgments are usually easier to recover.
A $100 judgment against Apple Computer could be worth $100 (less if you pay someone to enforce it). A 10 million dollar judgment against a homeless old hard drug addict is probably worth nothing.
Even if the judgment debtor has assets, the bigger a judgment is, the smaller the chance there is that inexpensive recovery methods will work, and the more chance the debtor will attempt to take actions to increase expenses and/or avoid recovery.
In many cases, once a debtor suspects they are going to get sued, or you win a judgment against them, they have already hid, moved, transferred their assets, or gave them away.
Many times, world class scoundrels conceal assets in people's names who they (e.g.) knew in college, that a creditor will never learn about. Sometimes they are in such a hurry, they make mistakes, and that may create the opportunity for a possible judgment enforcement.
When there are big judgments against scoundrels, sometimes a good recovery specialist can recover a judgment much later. Sometimes it is similar to long-term chess game. Other times, it becomes an eventual answer to the puzzle of, where are the assets?
If you take on a big judgment, be sure both you and the original judgment creditor are realistic about the chances for recovery. Once in a while, a judgment debtor has a lot of assets showing. Much less often, some debtors have much more assets than is required to enforce the judgment.
With regular difficult judgments, the contingency fee (charge) is typically 50% of the recovered amount, without any costs to the original judgment owner.
In the rare situation, when the debtors are actually rich, have many assets showing, are stable, the fees change, and many enforcers charge less of a percentage.
In my job, I notice a pattern. An entity or person was not content with just being rich, and they defrauded people or entities, got sued, and got judgments against them. Years later, usually the judgment debtor (and many people) are not as rich as they did before the past.
Scoundrels often make foolish long-term choices, and the economic decline has made even wise decisions seem now silly. The typical scoundrel has lost more than an average non-scoundrel. When a judgment debtor gets sick, is old, loses their home, job, or dies; it is very often much more difficult to enforce judgments against them.
Clever debtors with assets, usually hide them in other people's names or internationally. Most debtors do not have enough assets available to enforce a large judgment against them.
While judgment owners with time and money, might wish to harass a debtor without available assets, any enforcers that works on a contingency basis will give up if there are no potential assets available to satisfy the judgment. Also, laws do change all the time, that may make it harder to recover judgments.
