Should You Let a Collection Agency Handle Your Judgment?
3 min readWinning a judgment means winning a civil lawsuit for which some sort of monetary compensation is awarded. The winning party becomes the judgment creditor while the losing party becomes the judgment debtor. The big question is this: who will ultimately handle collection? It is a question every judgment creditor must answer at some point.
The important thing to remember is that courts only offer limited assistance in terms of enforcement. For instance, a judgment creditor may return to court seeking a writ of seizure in order to seize and sell a piece of the debtor’s property. But with the exception of procedures that require court orders, creditors are pretty much on their own for collection.
There Are Options
Judgment creditors do have options in terms of who is going to handle collection. Those options are as follows:
- In-House – When collections are handled in-house, the judgment creditor does everything. Whether it is an individual or company’s accounting team, no outside parties get involved.
- An Attorney – Some judgment creditors rely on their attorneys to collect for them. Sometimes it works out, other times it doesn’t. Attorneys have other things to do. They have other cases to work on.
- A Collection Agency – Judgment creditors can turn to collection agencies as well. In such a case, it is wise to utilize an agency that specializes in judgments.
Judgment Collectors out of Salt Lake City, UT is one such agency. By specializing only in collections, Judgment Collectors can focus all their time and attention on what is arguably a more complex form of debt collection.
Advantages of Sending a Judgment to Collection
It makes sense that judgment creditors will first attempt in-house collection or leave the matter to their attorneys. It just seems like the simplest and most logical thing to do. Unfortunately, many who do so find out that collecting isn’t as simple as it sounds.
On the other hand, turning a judgment over to a collection agency from the very beginning has its advantages. Here are just a few of them:
1. Experienced Collection Teams
Companies like Judgment Collectors employ teams of highly experienced professionals who know what it takes to succeed. These are people who know the collections game inside and out. They are also very familiar with how judgments work.
2. A Single Mission
Organizations that try to collect in-house have other things to do. The accounting team cannot devote itself exclusively to collection. Likewise for an attorney. But when it comes to a collection agency, there is a single mission. An agency is not involved in things that have nothing to do with debt collection.
3. Distraction Elimination
Distraction is one of the biggest challenges of trying to collect in-house. Judgment creditors are distracted from doing more important things, including taking care of their own customers, by having to devote time to collection. Bring in a collection agency and the distraction is eliminated.
4. Advanced Skills and Tools
The biggest advantage of bringing in a collection agency is the fact that agencies have advanced skills and tools that attorneys and in-house accounting teams might not have access to. The skills and tools are utilized to track down hidden assets and locate debtors who are trying to elude collection efforts.
Bringing in a judgment collection agency does cost money, but so does hiring an attorney. Even in-house collections cost money in the sense that someone has to be paid to do the work. In the end, most judgment creditors get the best bang for their buck by bringing in an experienced collection agency with a higher likelihood of success.