Earlier today AverageOldGuy posted the idea that possibly Russian money was behind Trump's bond.

[moniss]

52. I agree with you 100%

that inherently under normal circumstances this stuff is routine. I also agree with you that there is a ton of misinformation out there about civil cases, judgements, process etc. When people were proclaiming that a plaintiff can just go and have the county sheriff put locks on the doors the day a time for filing an appeal has expired don't understand legal process. I tried to get people to slow down and understand that once a deadline passes there is legal paperwork that goes to the court asking for an order. A simplification of that is that the plaintiff lawyers file a motion noting the case, the decision, the law regarding time to file an appeal, an explanation of the date when the clock started ticking and when it would end. They would note that the time has now expired and they would request an order to allow seizure of assets that are known to be able to satisfy the judgement. That is greatly simplified and if a judge wanted to allow a bank account for instance to be attached he could go for it in a simple case but even in simple cases when you're collecting a judgement it is not always that simple.

I remember several years ago helping a lady collect on a small claims judgement she had against a person doing odd-job home repair/remodeling on the side of his regular employment with a carpet company. The dollar amount was small as I remember like under $1000 or so. She gave him cash he never came back but was still at the carpet company. So I thought it would be a simple matter of getting paperwork to the carpet company to garnish wages or to the county sheriff's office for them to serve on banks etc. I was surprised to find out that first she had to "perfect" the judgement. Which meant filing specific paperwork with the court basically saying you had been in case number such and such and judgement had been given in your favor and now you were notifying the court and the defendant that you were asking for the process for collecting to proceed. That may be a little clumsy in wording but that is basically the gist of it. So you serve the papers on the other party and then they have x number of days to respond. In this case the guy didn't and so we go to the next legal step is that she had to file papers with the court asking for a hearing to get an order for collection. That notice of hearing gets served on the defendant and also requires the defendant to provide financial information for the hearing. In this case he blew it all off and he disappeared.

But if he hadn't and he had showed up in court then the judge would look at the financials, hear from the parties and then under guidelines used he would make a determination about garnishment, taking bank accounts etc. and the judge would issue an order that then the plaintiff can use to move on banks, employers etc. Similarly here in the case of a complex web of assets, liens and huge judgements a court is going to hold hearings and flesh out the financials etc. and make a ruling on which assets to seize in order to satisfy the judgement. That is a legal process.

Some people have been floating the idea that a plaintiff can just go and start grabbing everything up. The legal process is there so that a plaintiff recovers what they are entitled to by judgement and not by grabbing/encumbering assets that are 4 times higher in value than the judgement or that have circumstances that require further court scrutiny. That is all what is supposed to happen during the legal process to collect on a judgement. As you previously so correctly pointed out, once an appeal is lost and finalized or a deadline to appeal passes the plaintiff now accrues the right to move into the legal process for collection on the judgement.