Most successful business owners have learned over time to manage the routine day-to-day responsibilities of serving customers and meeting payrolls. Successful business owners are naturally inclined to run a tight ship. They hire just enough staff, equipped with just the right skills, to help them get the firm’s “normal” work done. That recovery involving significant sums of money is not “normal” work. There is no employee available to assign the job to.
If the missing money is too important to ignore and the owner tries to manage the collection process himself, the potential complexity of the debt recovery process, combined with the owner’s unfamiliarity with the methodologies involved, will compound the negative impact of the missing money by depriving the business of the owner’s experience, time, and attention. If dispatching one or two friendly collection notes fail to get the job done, it’s time for the wise business owner to get professional assistance from an experienced debt recovery solicitor.
In many instances, merely replacing your mildly worded reminder of an unpaid debt with a tersely worded threat of impending legal action – tendered in stark black and white on your solicitor’s legal stationary – is all that is required to motivate prompt payment. A quick solution, well worth the price.
If that first note is ignored, or worse, contains notification that your debtor has petitioned for protection under applicable bankruptcy laws, you as a business owner face a clear decision. You can add the amount of the debt to the firm’s balance sheet on the “uncollectible debt” line, or bump up the amount on the “legal expenses” line on this year’s budget and probably next year’s as well.
If you opt for the second choice, you can go back to making money by doing the things you actually know how to do, and delegate the debt recovery function to your new highly qualified “contract employee”.
Your solicitor, with the advantage of competent administrative assistance, will generate preformatted and respectfully worded requests for relief through the appropriate courts. The relief sought will generally include compensation for your legal expenses, and ongoing interest payments on the unpaid debt balance. Time will pass as your solicitor shepherds your case through court backlogs and debtor delay tactics. The process would be horribly draining for you, but is business as usual for your solicitor.
Eventually the court will render a judgment on your behalf. If no payment is forthcoming following the court’s judgment, your solicitor will use knowledge gleaned through the court proceedings to select a course for enforcing the judgment. The solicitors options may include obtaining a warrant allowing seizure of goods or property in payment of the debt, obtaining a charging order which freezes some of the debtor’s assets until payment is received, or a court ordered attachment of the debtor’s wages or other income from which the court extracts monthly installment payments on the original debt, interest on the unpaid balance, and legal expenses. Your solicitor has the experience and resources to undertake any of these options in a cost-effective manner. By this point, the wisdom of your decision to delegate debt recovery to a competent “contract employee” should be abundantly clear.
Evolution Legal covers a range of different services including, employment law, property law, as well as divorce law.
