I like to think that we are an environmentally oriented law firm. We are very, very heavy into commercial collections and enforcement of judgements. So you may ask what do I mean environment, I’m not talking about the weather. We like to, if you will, collect a debt through attacking or using the environment of the debtor of judgement debtor. Oftentimes, litigators will immediately rush after winning a case in the court and put the judgement debtor onto the stand in what we call an order for appearance of judgement debtor or a post judgement exam. Which is essentially the same thing they did to win their case in the underlying litigation.

And my response to them and I teach the course the California bar has authorized me to teach for MCLE credits, I tell them what makes you think this fellow whom you’ve just beaten up is going to suddenly tell you that he’s got $150,000.00 in the Bank of America at the corner Seventh and Flower? The answer is he’s not. He’s going to lie to you. He’s going to mislead you. He’s going to play with you.

So I don’t put on the judgement debtor my approach is to go to his environment. My wife doesn’t like it but 85-year old mothers and 90-year old fathers and ex-girlfriends, current girlfriends, wives, ex-wives are wonderful we can actually go after them and bring them in under California law. And ask them questions of a very broad nature making them help us find both the assets, the monies, and the modus operandi, the method, if you will, of operation of the judgement debtor. So that we want to make him as uncomfortable in a lawful fashion and again, I use the word lawful. We don’t play games, we don’t ever cross the line. But we want to make him so uncomfortable that A) we and go after the assets we discover or B) he decides we’re such a pain that he better come to the table and cut a deal with us even if he’s owing a lot of money to other people.

So the uniqueness of our approach is attacking lawfully the environment of the debtor making him, again, uncomfortable, and maybe he’s a member of the local golf club. Well, I’ve brought in the president of the golf club, the secretary, the treasurer, how’s this fellow doing? Well now, everybody at the golf club will now know that he’s a deadbeat debtor owing money to my client. That’s not going to be very comfortable for most debtors. Some don’t care but the vast majority of them care about what they look like in their immediate society.

Before we do this, we are extraordinarily thorough and again, lawful in finding assets, finding bank accounts lawfully, finding the work location, the setup of the debtor, and going after those assets once we discover what they are. So we do require our clients to advance certain monies for a nationwide usually in depth, exhaustive, verified search for assets, search for bank accounts. Again, I keep repeating the word lawful because there’s so much of the work done by some lawyers that cross the line, which we won’t do.

But we tell our clients we can’t do a good job unless we know what assets are there, what assets are not there, what assets might have been transferred to a wife, an ex-wife, a child, a trust. And so again, this is part of that environmental approach, find out your debtors worth. Find out everything you can about your debtor so that when you ultimately ask questions of third parties or ultimately of the debtor you know the answers better than they do and you can trap them if they’re not telling you the truth.

So our aggressiveness, our pushing the envelop much more than many of my colleagues, I’m kind of known for that, I’ll take the risk of lawfully pushing the envelope in every case and trying to get maximum return for my clients.

Having said that, that becomes labor intensive and as a rule, we don’t work on what is called a contingency fee basis. We take a limited number of cases. We focus on those cases. We work those cases and we can’t really afford to roll the dice, so to say, on what some contingency fee lawyers do because they have to take in 10 times as many cases as we do because they’re still going for the easiest cases first and so forth. So that uniqueness, that aggressiveness, that pushing the envelope are the things that I pride in my law firm and my law personnel.