Several times a week, judgment creditors contact me and claim they have a solid gold judgment that is worth a lot of cash up-front; because they have a judgment against some company and have already filed a lien against the business, and while the business is out of business/doing poorly, the guy owning the company is wealthy, so “all you have to do to collect is go after that guy to force them to pay the judgment”.
The big show stopper is, if the company is a corporation, it most often shields the owners from paying any of that company’s liabilities. When the company was named slightly differently than listed on the judgment, it can be relatively simple to modify the judgment to correct their name, as long as there’s not any additional parties added.
If the judgment creditor did not sue an individual, there is only one way to attempt and include an individual to that judgment later is to attempt to prove some kind of fraud with a new lawsuit. There’s 3 problems with this idea; it is really costly, there is not any guarantee it will be successful, and it will not do any good when there’s insufficient available assets. Judgment buyers pay very little cash up-front for judgment circumstances such as.
This article is my opinion and is not, legal advice. I’m the judgment recovery expert, and not a lawyer. When you want legal advice or a strategy to use, you should retain an attorney.
Some other judgment owners explain to me that they have a judgment debtor that is a DBA (Doing Business As) company and recorded a lien against that DBA business, “So their lien also attaches to the business owner’s condo”. The show-stopper is, that lien just attaches to the precise name(s) named on their judgment that supports that lien.
Fictitious Business Names (FBNs) also known as DBAs, are alternative names for individual(s) and is not a separate legal entity. A judgment only against just FBN name alone, needs to get modified by the court for any chance for it to be enforced, and a lien recorded against only a DBA almost always does nothing.
Even though a DBA/FBN is not really separate from the owner, it may be seen as a distinct entity. Because of this, in many states, a bank account in the name of the FBN can be levied when a judgment owner supplies a declaration and proof of who owns the FBN. In California, as per CCP 700.160, an individual(s) bank account held in some FBN may be levied by supplying and providing an unexpired FBN document that has been certified.
When a judgment is only against a sole proprietorship’s DBA business name and you record a lien with that DBA name, that judgment lien will not attach to any real property owned by the business owner. For a chance to recover a judgment against any kind of property, both the judgment and any liens, needs to have the identical names as the registered property owner.
The title companies are not required to look at all possible name variations or business FBN names of any owners of real estate property. It is the responsibility of the judgment owner to check that a lien will attach. Liens in the name of Dan Debtor will most likely never reach property that is owned by the name of Daniel T. Debtor, trustee of the “Debtor Family Trust dated May 16, 2005?. One way to go is to get your judgment amended to add the correct name of the business owner. In California, this is usually done with an affidavit of identity.
You could then record your brand new judgment lien updated with the information on your amended judgment, although that would cause that new lien to lose the lien priority which it had before. A smarter way to go is to record an amended lien (in California, this is covered by CCP 674), because that will preserve the priority of the lien’s recording date. The amended abstract/lien will retain the original filing date for the priority of the lien when it is properly filled out by (e.g.) checking the correct box on the form, and listing the previous lien filing number.
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