Many people and corporations believe that obtaining a judgement will be the end of the matter. In fact enforcement is the most important part of any litigator’s job and needs to be considered before proceedings are started. There is no point throwing good money after bad.
If you have a judgement you usually have six years to enforce it. There are a number of enforcement options which you may wish to consider:
- Insolvency – if an individual making the debtor bankrupt or liquidating a company. However you should be aware that the costs include a substantial payments to the official receiver.
- Attachments of earnings order – if a debtor is an individual and employed you can apply to get a direct monthly payment out of their salaries. This can mean a long wait to get full payment.
- Third party debt order – which allows you to freeze any accounts of the debtor and get repaid from that account. The difficulty is in finding those accounts in the first place.
- Obtaining a charging order against a property – if the debtor owns a property you can get a charging order and eventually it is usually possible to get an order for sale.
- Bailiff – the great difficulty with this is that the bailiffs do not have the power to enter residential homes only commercial premises and it is often very difficult to find any goods worth removing and selling.
- Order for questioning – You can call the debtor for questioning however many debtors ignore this request and when they do attend do not give helpful replies.