Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog
A judgment is a piece of paper that says you were right. It is not money. Illinois will not collect it for you, the clerk will not call the defendant, and nothing about the entry of judgment stops a debtor from doing what many of them started doing the week they were served. The building goes into a spouse’s name. The operating account empties into a new company with a similar name, the same phone number, and the same customers. The equipment sells at a price nobody negotiated to an entity a brother-in-law formed in March. The creditor who spent two years winning finds a defendant who owns a leased car and a phone.
That is the ordinary shape of a collection problem, and it is more solvable than it looks. Illinois gives a judgment creditor the power to compel testimony and documents from the debtor and from anyone holding his property, to freeze that property while the inquiry runs, and to take it. The Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act gives the creditor a way to undo the transfers that emptied the estate in the first place. Neither tool runs by itself, and both reward the creditor who moves early, because the money is usually still traceable in the first ninety days and frequently is not traceable a year later.