Judgment Enforcement

Once a judgment is obtained in California, or domesticated from another state or country to California, the judgment-creditor must then engage in efforts to force the judgment-debtor to satisfy the judgment. A judgment is itself only a piece of paper, and the court will not on its own force a judgment-debtor to pay any money to a judgment-creditor.

Upon obtaining a judgment, we employ aggressive, yet professional, collection techniques to earn our clients a return on the costs invested for suit. If voluntary payment is not forthcoming, we perform comprehensive asset searches and map out options for involuntary collection.

The most common remedies and enforcement procedures include: one, placing liens on real property owned by the debtor; two, levying upon income the debtor may currently have (for individual debtors, this comes in the form of a earnings withholding order, commonly known as a wage garnishment, and for business debtors, this entails attaching the company’s accounts’ receivables, using keepers in the business and a whole host of other creative methods); three, levying bank accounts.

While the above three sources of assets are the ultimate goal, how we locate and discover such assets is not always a straight and narrow path. We use different strategies to locate such assets depending on the individual debtor, including judgment debtors’ examinations, this is the process whereby sworn testimony is elicited from debtors (or other related individuals, including corporate officers, debtors’ ex-spouses, etc.) concerning the debtor’s assets and finances, subscriptions to proprietary databases, retention of private investigators, and many more methods that our offices has developed over the years.

In the end, the goal is to apply enough legal pressure on the debtor as to force the debtor to pay pursuant to the terms of the judgment. Sometimes this comes from draining their personal bank account. Sometimes this is derived from the debtor’s fear of appearing in court, sworn in under penalty of perjury, and delivering honest answers. More often than not, in the end, the debtor arrives at a voluntary methodology of payment (either a payment plan or settlement offer) to keep our offices at bay.