A Practitioner's Overview of Enforcing a Civil Money Judgment

• Jurisdiction: Wyoming,United States
• Citation: Vol. 31 No. 3 Pg. 2
• Date: 01 June 2008
• Publication year: 2008
• Pages: 2
• Year: 2008
• topic: Creditor Rights / Civil Enforcement,Banking and Finance Law,Civil Procedure

Wyoming Bar Journal 2008.

Vol. 31, No. 3, #2. A Practitioner's Overview of Enforcing a Civil Money Judgment

Wyoming Bar Journal
Issue: June, 2008

Author: Bret T. Allred and J. Philip Bott

A Practitioner's Overview of Enforcing a Civil Money Judgment

A civil money judgment's true value is realized through an effective plan for post-judgment enforcement. This article will discuss the methods to discover the existence and location of a judgment debtor's ("Debtor") property as well as the three most common methods for obtaining and selling the property: Garnishment, Continuing Garnishment, and Execution. The history, development equitable/legal theories, or how to address exceptional circumstances of enforcing a civil money judgment ("Judgment") will not be discussed

Finding the Assets

There are a number of non-judicial means available to locate the assets of a Debtor. County Treasurer's and Assessor's offices have public records relating to vehicle and property ownership. There are also subscription services to find location and asset information on Debtors via Internet-hosted databases. However, these services tend to be expensive and are more targeted toward firms which participate in enforcement activities on a large scale. Individual cases may justify the use of private investigators, but the cost of such a service would have to be balanced against the potential for return.

Judicially enforced methods of locating assets are made available in the Wyoming Statutes ("WS") and Rules of Civil Procedure ("W.R.C.P."). Wyoming Statutes 1-17-402 and 1-21-517 allow the judgment creditor ("Creditor") to "obtain discovery by interrogatories, depositions or otherwise, from any person, including the judgment debtor, in accordance with the Wyoming Rules of Civil Procedure." The scope for post-judgment discovery is quite broad, limited only by the...