[MCAColllector]

As some of you may/may not know, I’m a collections attorney in the industry and have been doing this for almost 10 years. I usually lurk on the forum to get the industry gossip, but sometimes I’ll jump in and participate.

Over the years, I’ve worked at a few different collections companies in the space and I have represented several funders in their collections matters. Now, I have my own firm and I’m thinking about all of the old deals that funders put in “write off” status. Of course, there will be deals that are in bankruptcy, or are otherwise uncollectible. But, what do you do when you’ve sent a deal to your collections attorney of choice, they’ve filed the lawsuit and tried to find assets, etc. and they have not collected? Let’s say it’s been a year or even two+ years since you sent the file. Do you pull it from the attorney at any point and place it with a different attorney or collections company? Or, do you just put them in write off status and kind of forget about them? Have you ever considered selling to a debt buyer to recoup at least some money for investors?

I’m asking this because I am interested in getting into either debt buying or second placement collections this year in addition to the first placement collections that I do now. I’m also genuinely curious. New York judgments are good for 20 years, and I know from working at various collection companies in the space that they really mainly focus on the newer deals and only really circle back to the old deals a couple of times a year, if that. I can’t blame them for this, as the collectibility of a deal goes down significantly as time moves forward, but debtors also tend to forget about judgments after a while and may pop up with assets/money later.

This whole post came from me collecting on a very old deal from 4 years ago last week. Basically, there could be a lot of money out there in write off deals that no one is really paying consistent attention to and I thought I would get DF’s take! Thanks all!

[KollectionsGuy]

I too am a collections attorney in the MCA space (have been doing this for a decade as well), I can tell you that I periodically review all written off accounts. I've worked in-house for several MCA companies and each one had me engage in yearly reviews of all write-off accounts (since restraints can be issued once a year) and asked that I issue restraints on anything that was not in Bankruptcy. I would like to think this is common practice, although I may be mistaken.

[MCAColllector]

Yes. That is my experience too. Most collections companies in the space will engage in a yearly review while focusing more of their energy on the fresh files. That’s what I always did when I worked in-house.

My question was more directed towards funders. Do funders just forget about files that are written off? Or, are they selling to debt buyers or placing them with second placement collections companies that are focused on collecting those older files more than once a year? In my experience, with my clients and in the past, nothing is really done with these files most of the time.