What is judgment collection?

What is judgment collection?

Legal procedures

We are living in a world where the major companies are very lawfully aware of the constitution and every move, whether on the commercial level or an individual level is made under the complete guidance of the laws that govern them. This has led to an increase in the number of lawsuits faced and filed by companies and persons all over the world every year.

Whether you are involved in legal matters or not it is irrelevant, there is always some time in life where unfortunately you are bound to be dragged into some kind of legal skirmish and you know the rest. The case at hand doesn’t need to be always criminal. There can be social disputes as well.

Whatever the case may be, there is always a judgment given at the end of it and there is the process of collecting it. Now, this topic differs depending on the judgment we are talking about and that in turn depends on the type of the case that we had in our hands in the first place.

What is the judgment?

A judgment is nowadays more popularly known as the final verdict passed on a lawsuit. In any kind of legal skirmish involving companies or individuals, the opposing parties can file lawsuits against each other for violating any condition that was set up during their pre-work agreement.

Now, this lawsuit is processed by the court and the final verdict is given out to both the parties thereby declaring the successful ones. This final decision is what we know as a judgment. So to define in layman terms, a judgment can be defined as the final decision given by a court of law in response to a lawsuit filed by any party.

There are of course lawyers and other factors involved in the legal matters but there is a matter which escapes most of the people’s notice. This is a very important matter and it’s very simple as well, this is none other than that of judgment collection.

Judgment collection

After every legal battle is over and fortunately you have emerged victorious in the final decision, your duties do not necessarily end there, but there is the matter of the collection of the final judgment. Now, this is not something as simple as a collection of some papers, there is a completely legal procedure to perform judgment collection.

The first step that we have to face in this matter is the fact that after the court has ruled, we have to wait for the formal judgment which is drawn up by the clerk and then it needs to be issued. Typically this matter needs 2 to 4 weeks, but sometimes the work pressure can also postpone it to be as late as 4 to 6 months. This doesn’t end there. Once the judgment has been issued, it needs to be recorded in various legal places ad courts, depending on the court that passed the judgment.

Now there is something important to note before we proceed further, the concept of judgment collection technically means the collection of debt from the faulty party as obtained from the lawsuit. So after a judgment has been issued, it needs to be recorded in all the countries where the faulty party owns any kind of assets before the court can legally move onto the process of judgment collection.

Now there are a few steps involved in a court-ordered judgment collection and they are given below:

Locating the assets of the debtor

The first step of the judgment collection process is to locate and isolate the assets held by the debtor. It’s also needed to calculate the amount of asset that needs to be taken for satisfying the final judgment. This is a very complex task as more than often the debtors are very cunning in hiding their properties not only for evading the judgment collectors but also for hiding from taxations.

For simple debtors also, this process is a little complicated as the assets of the debtor are generally so much spread out that it is difficult to determine a satisfactory starting point for determining the asset locations of the debtor and then move forward as long as the judgment is not satisfied.

Debtor’s interrogatories

This is done to ease the process of the location of the debtor’s assets. In this method, the debtor is summoned to the court and is made to answer some questions about their financial sources and other assets. This is done to get an accurate idea of the location of the debtor’s assets. This is a very strict legal procedure.

If the debtor fails to be present for any of these court summons, then the court can rule the debtor to be in contempt of the court and can be kept in legal custody as long as the debtor does not any satisfactory reason for their absence or any monetary bond for their release. Needless to say that these kinds of occurrences are pretty common and they also delay the process of judgment collection.

Levies of the debtor

This is done in a very small number of cases. In this case, the local legal authority can seize the debtor’s property and sell it at a public auction to satisfy the judgment. This is a more stringent way of judgment collection and is done in severe cases where the debtor is unable or unwanting to settle the judgment.

Judgment liens

This is the most passive form of judgment collection.  In this process, any property owned by the debtor is marked as a judgment lien and that means that he or she has some unpaid judgments. So that means that whenever the debtor would try to sell off the property they won’t be able to do so without satisfying the judgment first. As this is the most passive form of judgment collection and is based on property transactions, mostly houses and estates, this judgment collection procedure is the most time-consuming technique.


The article can be concluded that the main factor needed for an effective judgment collection is the property information of the debtor. The more accurate and faster the information is the faster the process becomes. If a debtor furnishes precise information regarding their property, then the whole judgment collection process can be wrapped up in a few weeks.

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