An important part of any judgment business is finding potentially good judgment leads. There are not as many good judgments out there as there used to be. Usually, the easy ones are recovered by the creditors or their lawyers. This article is my opinion, and not legal advice. I am a judgment referral expert, and am not a lawyer. If you ever need any legal advice or a strategy to use, please contact a lawyer.
Judgment brokers, and possibly some collection agencies and others, pay referral fees for judgment leads you send to them. The choices are usually pennies per raw lead, or about 5% of what is eventually recovered in the future. Most people do better with 5% of what may be recovered in the future.
To increase the chances of a judgment lead paying off, you might try to get a copy of the judgment, and what is known about the debtor along with the judgment. That way, you will know the creditor is serious, and the creditor's judgment will be ready to be enforced.
You could create a nationwide judgment recovery referral business, using only marketing. If you only refer judgment leads, then no judgment recovery knowledge or skills are needed, you only need to use marketing. To do this, you start by finding a judgment broker or a good collection agency.
In this business model, you tell judgment owners you know the best company to recover their judgment. When the judgment debtors have assets, judgment owners do not have to assign their judgment, and can get their judgments recovered at the best rates. If the debtors are rich, judgment owners get the best possible rates. That should help sell many creditors.
Because you will know the best place to refer creditors to, you simply screen the creditor a bit, and gather information and refer their judgment lead. You should learn enough so that you will know what you are talking about, however when you do not enforce judgments, life is much cheaper and easier.
If you simply refer all incoming judgment leads, and owned no judgments, you could work in every State. You could help judgment owners worldwide, without learning much about judgment enforcement laws. For this to work, the following conditions must be true, to avoid complications, legal involvement, or appearing in court, at least not for any matters related to the judgment leads you refer:
1) You do not have ownership of any judgments.
2) You do not represent anyone else.
3) You do not try to enforce any judgments.
4) You do not contact any debtors.
5) You do not charge any money, or have any contracts with any creditors or debtors.
If you only refer judgments and follow the five conditions above, you could have a home-based judgment referral business. All you would need is a computer, a simple database or spreadsheet to keep records on, a backup solution, a phone with voicemail to catch missed calls, a fax (or a web-based fax solution, for example UnityFax.com), and a post office box (or the UPS store).
If you refer all incoming judgment leads, your job is marketing. The new way is the web, unfortunately everyone has discovered this, so it takes a lot of work or money to get noticed. I recommend making or getting a simple web site, if only to save you time explaining things. You could hire, or do your own web and SEO marketing, or just put up your web site. You could market by getting 1,000 business cards printed and dressing well, and handing them to people coming out of court, or to attorneys. Or, you could have no business cards at all, and use only the internet.
Even if you decide to start or run a judgment referral business, nothing stops you from learning how to recover judgments, and taking and enforcing certain judgments where the debtors are local to you.
Mark D Shapiro