Introduction and Outline

TOWNLEY KINGSTON DEBT RECOVERY

Managing your Debt Portfolio

Court proceedings are not necessarily the best recovery strategy in every case. You may trust in a particular individual to address their debt in good faith in accordance with his or her ability to do so and you might therefore consider proceedings to be unnecessary.  Further, you may feel that the level of a particular debt weighed against the cost of recovering it and the risk involved does not justify the immediate incurring of legal recovery costs and is more suited to a ‘wait and see’ approach.  In all cases it is for you, with the benefit of your local knowledge and your special knowledge of the particular Debtor, to make a commercial decision on what you feel is the appropriate action to take in order to recover the debt due to you in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible.

Different stages of the debt recovery process prompt different reactions from debtors. Some will pay on receipt of a solicitor’s letter.  Some will use the process to buy time so as to enable them to pay the debt.  Others will attempt to negotiate a compromise, for example, involving staged payments.  Many will maintain that they are simply not in a position to pay the debt.  The stage to which you are prepared to go to recover your debt will ultimately be your decision. 

However, we would stress that a current inability to pay is by no means a future certainty that the particular Debtor will never be able to pay all or part of the debt.  Moreover, we have found that an increasing number of debtors have begun to use the current economic difficulties as a cloak to deny that they have access to funds to meet their debt when in fact they do have the ability to pay all or part of their debt, but simply choose not to, or choose to use the money for other purposes.

The benefit of continued legal pressure on your Debtor ensures that when they do come into or gain access to money, whether it be by way of new business, personal loans, banking credit or inheritance, they will feel the need to pay you over and above their other creditors.  The continued legal pressure keeps their debt to you at the forefront of their minds.

It is for these reasons that we generally advise our clients to proceed to obtain judgment against their debtors and, if possible, secure that judgment against the property of the Debtor.  Generally, if the Debtor is acting in good faith in his or her dealings with you they will not contest the debt and thus allow judgment.  As a corollary, if a Debtor does contest the debt where you feel it cannot be genuinely disputed, that Debtor is one against whom you will generally need to proceed to judgment and enforcement if you are ever to recover your debt.

We have found that the key element in successfully managing your debt portfolio is through maintaining regular communication, either yourself or if necessary through our offices, with your Debtor.  Simply allowing the debt to remain outstanding without taking any action to recover it is something we strongly advise against.  You can rest assured that other creditors will be moving to secure their debt and this would leave you last in the queue to collect should your Debtor begin paying off his or her debts.  As you are probably aware, there is a six year limitation period on the bringing of proceedings on foot of a contract debt.

Click here for a brief outline of the issuing of proceedings and the forums available to you.
Click here for an outline of the enforcement options available to you.

Our fee structure can be found here.

We hope that you find this page useful. We should be most happy to discuss your debt portfolio, or any particular debt, with you further and in that regard please do not hesitate to contact us via our online enquiry facility.