Being taken to civil court is almost always a bad deal. Lose the case and you are likely to face a judgment that includes some sort of financial award. That award becomes your legal responsibility. Pay it. Do whatever you have to do to come up with the money. The last thing you want is for the judgment to go to collection.
A judgment going to collection is more or less the judgment creditor – the party that took you to court and won – turning enforcement over to a collection agency. The agency can be a general collection agency that handles all sorts of debts or a specialized agency that handles only judgments.
Salt Lake City-based Judgment Collectors is in the latter category. They say you do not want a judgment going to collection for multiple reasons:
1. They Know How the Game Is Played
Your typical judgment collection agency is staffed by individuals who have been around the block a time or two. They know how the game is played. They have seen every trick in the book in terms of judgment debtors trying to hide assets or get lost. They know the tactics debtors employ to avoid paying. Most importantly, nothing you could do in an attempt to not pay would surprise an experienced collection agency.
2. They Know How to Find Assets
There are a lot of advantages to hiring a judgment collection agency in the aftermath of a successful lawsuit. One of the most important is the agency’s ability to find assets. Your typical judgment creditor possesses neither the knowledge nor skill to dig around for assets that are not clearly visible. But collection agencies specialize in this sort of thing.
Firms like Judgment Collectors know how to use a full range of publicly available data to find assets. But that’s not all. They also have access to proprietary databases and other tools the general public has no knowledge of. Suffice it to say that hiding assets from a good collection agency is very difficult.
3. They Are Experts at Skip Tracing
Debtor attorneys will sometimes advise their clients to move and not provide forwarding address information. Attorneys have even been known to advise their clients to leave the state. Moving presents problems for judgment creditors trying to collect on their own. Not so much for experienced collection agencies.
Another skill collection agencies possess in spades is the ability to employ skip tracing. You could say collection agency employees are skip tracing experts. What is skip tracing? It is a collection of tools and strategies designed to help find people who don’t want to be found. It is something private detectives use all the time. So do collection agencies.
4. They Tend to Be Relentless
Finally, a good judgment collection agency is pretty much relentless. Agencies either purchase debts outright or work on consignment. When a judgment is purchased, the agency wants to recover what it paid along with covering its costs and earning some profit. It is not about to give up after a short fight.
A collection agency that works on consignment hasn’t purchased the debt in question. Instead, it agrees to do the work in exchange for a certain percentage of the amount collected. Here’s the thing: an agency does not want to put in a ton of time and effort and not get paid. That is exactly what happens if the agency fails to collect.
Judgment collection agencies are relentless because they want to get paid. It’s as simple as that. If nothing else, this is why you don’t want a judgment going to collection.
