Legal Question in Civil Litigation in Arizona

Re: small claims court judgement collections

The easiest way is going to be to hire a good collections attorney who'll take between 13 and 35 percent of the sums collected (shop around).

If you've got time to invest, you can do judgment debtor interrogatories (you've got to know what questions to ask); if you know where the defendant has a bank account, or an employer's name, (or anyone else you know of who owes the defendant money) you can do a garnishment against those sources of income; if you know of property owned by the defendant within the state, which is not excluded by law from levy, you can ask the court to issue a writ of fieri facias ("fi.fa.", pronounced "fie-fay") which is a command to the sheriff to attach the property and subject it to court control. Any property or funds you levy against will be under the court's control, and you may have to post a bond in order to have it sold.

The clerk's office will have a bunch of fill-in-the=blank-forms you'll have to have properly completed, with the right number of copies of each, along with the filing fee, for whatever you decide to do.

The bottom line is, if you don't know what you're doing, and the judgment is for a small amount (less than ten thousand dollars), you're going to spend a whole lot more time collecting than the judgment is worth. Take it to a collections lawyer who only does collections (like a collections factory) for whom it's worth it to collect because of the economy of doing a large number of similar cases at the same time.

Some collections agencies will buy your judgment from you, but you'll only get, like, ten cents on the dollar.