Legal Question in Business Law in California

Once you have a judgment entered against you, the fact of that judgment becomes a permanent or at least semi-permanent part of (a) the court's records; (b) your credit records, assuming the reporting agencies pick it up, which they probably will; and (c) if the judgment creditor prepared and recorded one or more abstracts of judgment in a county or counties where he/she/it thought you had property, it'll be there too.

You ordinarily cannot get these records physically expunged. The best you can do is to get the former creditor to prepare, file and perhaps record a Satisfaction of Judgment form, if I reccall, Judicial Council Form EJ-100 for a Superior Court judgment and a different form with an SC- series number for a Small Claims judgment.

The same is true of criminal convictions. Although there are statutes allowing the so-called expungement of a record of conviction, what really happens is that the court's record now has two entries; one, the conviction, and two, a notice to the public that the foregoing conviction is hereby expunged. The practical effect is that for most purposes the ex-offender doesn't have to list the so-called expunged conviction on job applications and such....that is, unless he's applying for a police job, etc. etc.

So, I think the best you can hope for is that your record will be amended to show that you paid, but the fact that there was a judgment in the first place is probably also going to show.

You don't. If you had negotiated a deal to have the case dismissed upon payment it would show that. Sounds like all you did was pay the judgment.