Judgment Collection And Courts

For a decade, I have been explaining to people that the potential worth of any judgment depends just on the available assets of the judgment debtor. Many people do not want to hear this, and then go to and get disappointed by misleading websites that offer to pay (for example) fifty to seventy-five percent cash up-front for judgments. The people behind such websites are flakes, because they totally ignore more than 99% of the people who send their judgment to them. Also, if or when they really do occasionally purchase judgments, they never pay more for any judgment than the amount it is really worth, always a lot less than 50% cash up-front.

My articles are my opinions and are not, legal advice. I am a judgment broker, and not a lawyer. When you ever want legal advice or a strategy to use, you should contact an attorney. Most judgments sell for a tiny fraction of the face value cash up-front because they are not guaranteed, an expense and a hassle to recover, and most are never collected. The majority of judgments have to get actively recovered, and any odds of all recoveries have always depended historically on what the debtors can be persuaded, or forced to pay.

Due to our economy, certain courts may be cutting back on services. Some may no longer support the court actions needed to try to recover a judgment, or cause long delays which make it more difficult to recover judgments. When a court downsizes or reduces their ability to support judgment recovery attempts, it reduces the value and marketability of all judgments rendered in the court.

Even now, courts in certain counties may be stopping or reducing support of certain post judgment recovery procedures, which deprives judgment creditors of the odds for collecting some money. With no court support and services, the only way to recover a judgment would be to try to work out a settlement with the debtor. However, those settlement agreements will be for very little money, because those judgment debtors will be aware that there is no method to levy the debtor's available with no writ from the court.

Some judgment collection experts and attorneys I know have recently talked about contingency plans to begin inverse condemnation lawsuits at a federal court. Their plan would be to plead that the state's actions in closing post-judgment court access, deprives creditors of their value in their property (their judgments) without compensation (reverse eminent domain); to attempt to force a state condemn judgments, and buy them from the judgment owners.

If reverse condemnation lawsuits could work for judgments, this would really wake up the relevant states; and make them understand there is some cost of not keeping civil courts fully open. Inverse condemnation and condemnation court lawsuits are most often bifurcated, which means the court rules on two issues sequentially and separately:

1) A trial to determine the liability, when there is none, things ends here.

2) A trial, often with a jury, to determine an appropriate amount of compensation. The compensation is usually based on what assets were damaged or taken. Laws allow the recovery of attorney and appraisal expenses in successful condemnation actions.

Alas, historically, most inverse and regular eminent domain/condemnation actions involved circumstances relating to real estate. A lot of legal research would be required to determine whether inverse condemnation might potentially apply to judgments. One more problem with that idea is that the cash up-front value of judgments is hard to estimate accurately.

This is a hot issue, as whenever courts close, or stops supporting post-judgment activities, that ruins the value of judgments even faster than bankruptcies do; and much faster than the bad economic situation hurts judgment recovery in general.

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