Month: June 2018

Winning a Judgment Does Not Mean You’ve “Won”

Picture this: an account becomes overdue and your in-house attorney files suit against the debtor. A judgment is awarded in your favor, but the debt still isn’t paid. You call Point Law and say “we have a judgment, so what do we do now? What’s next?”

We encounter this same situation over and over again. People automatically assume that suing and winning means getting paid. Unfortunately, even if you do sue and are awarded judgment, you aren’t done. Until the debt is collected, you will have spent time and money on what may turn out to be a lost cause. That’s why we implore you to try our unique approach to debt collections.

Our goal is for you to never have to ask the question, “now, how do we collect?” By getting your claims to us before bringing them to suit, we can reduce your costs, increase the number of paid-in-full accounts, and take away stress from your life and business.

Prior to suing, there’s a lot of investigative work that needs to be done. In industry speak, this is called “skip tracing.” We’re not just going to sue an account; that’s time, money, and effort wasted. So, we take the account and sniff it; we look at it. We see what assets are there.

When our internal team of experienced and educated collectors review and skip trace accounts, they look for common assets. We want to know what they have and what we can liquidate into cash to satisfy their debt to you. Any paperwork the debtor filled out when they on boarded with your company could have important details that are helpful to us in these searches.

Next, we start digging past the assets. What do we really know about the debtor? Have they filed bankruptcy? How many other judgments do they have against them? Are they still in business? If it’s a claim against a consumer, is that person working? We want to know what they owe and how likely (even with assets) they are to pay their debt either with or without a judgment. Collections isn’t just about finding assets, it’s about knowing how to use that asset to your advantage, and how to bring the claim to a Paid in Full status.

Now we contact the debtor to start collections. With our customer-centered approach, we can typically collect debts without having to use a judgment. However, if the debtor does not want to pay the amount in full or voluntarily set up a payment arrangement, we’ll often go ahead and file suit.

If the debtor truly has no assets, is unemployed, is on social security, etc., all of these things weigh heavily in our decision making. If we can’t locate any assets and we see the debtor has filed bankruptcy or they’ve been sued more than once in the past couple of years, then more than likely we will advise the client to close the account. There’s not a lot in this case we can do that makes financial sense for a $1500 account. Remember, you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

We get a lot of calls from individuals, small and large businesses, medical companies, doctors’ offices and more asking why they’re having a hard time collecting on their judgments. We believe suing is not the first answer, and we have a high success rate at solving your issues on the first call, without a judgment. Our ability to really sniff out an account adds value for our clients because we are being tactical in our decisions which helps you avoid timely and costly suits that get you nowhere. Try the Point Law difference today.