Commercial collections — from pre-litigation demand through judgment and post-judgment enforcement.

The calls follow patterns. The wholesale distributor whose biggest customer has been ramping past-due balance for nine months — $86,000 across 14 invoices — and who finally cuts off shipments and wants to know whether to sue. The HVAC contractor whose commercial customer disputes a $34,000 invoice for installed equipment and is now seven months past due. The professional services firm whose client signed a fee agreement, received 18 months of work, and has gone silent on a $54,000 unpaid balance. The real-estate investor whose commercial tenant abandoned the premises owing $128,000 in past-due rent and damages. The lender whose borrower has defaulted on a $230,000 commercial note that's personally guaranteed by the borrower's principal. The judgment-creditor holding a $410,000 NJ judgment two years old who has no idea how to actually collect on it. What they share is a debt that is real, documented, and owed — and a debtor who has decided that not paying is, for now, the cheaper option.

Commercial collections is mechanical work that rewards disciplined execution over theatrics. The pre-litigation demand resolves a meaningful share of cases where the debtor can pay but has been deprioritizing the obligation; the litigation stage is where genuinely contested cases get tried; and the post-judgment stage is where a paper judgment finally gets converted into money. New Jersey gives creditors a deep set of enforcement mechanisms — wage execution, bank levy, property liens, supplementary proceedings, charging orders — and the craft is matching the right one to the debtor's actual asset profile rather than firing all of them blindly. That is also why we run a collectibility analysis before we take the case: a claim that is airtight on liability but aimed at a debtor with no reachable assets can cost more to pursue than it ever returns, and telling you that candidly up front is part of the value we add.

What collections cases we take.

Our collections practice is creditor-side commercial work, and the distinction matters. We act for the party that is owed money — businesses and professional firms pursuing payment from customers, clients, and contractual counterparties — not for collection agencies or debt buyers chasing individual consumers, which is a separate, heavily regulated field we describe below. Within creditor-side commercial work, the matters we handle share a common shape: a documented obligation, a debtor who can be identified, and a recovery worth the cost of pursuing it. We represent:

• B2B accounts-receivable collections — invoices unpaid past 90/120/180 days from commercial customers.
• Professional services collections — unpaid retainers, legal fees, consulting fees, accounting fees, design fees.
• Contract damages — breach claims with provable damages that can be reduced to judgment.
• Commercial lease collections — past-due rent, holdover damages, lease-guaranty balances, and other commercial money obligations.
• Promissory notes — secured and unsecured commercial notes in default.
• Personal guaranties — pursuing personal-guarantor liability where corporate debtors lack collectible assets.
• Post-judgment enforcement — executing on existing NJ or foreign judgments.
• Foreign-judgment domestication — bringing out-of-state and federal judgments into NJ for enforcement.
• Replevin and asset recovery — securing collateral and identifiable property from defaulting borrowers.

Statutes of limitations.

A collection claim is only worth pursuing if it is still timely, so the limitations analysis comes first — before any demand letter goes out and before any cost is incurred. New Jersey sets different periods for different kinds of debt, and the clock does not always start where a client assumes it does. The periods below are the ones that govern most commercial collection work:

• Six years under N.J.S.A. 2A:14-1source — contract claims, account-stated debts, services rendered, most commercial accounts receivable. Runs from breach or last partial payment.
• Four years under N.J.S.A. 12A:2-725source — sale-of-goods claims under UCC Article 2.
• Six years for promissory notes under N.J.S.A. 2A:14-1source (longer for sealed instruments).
• Twenty years under N.J.S.A. 2A:14-5source — enforcement period for NJ judgments.
• Varying periods for specific statutory claims (the Consumer Fraud Act generally carries a six-year period; certain wage claims a shorter window; specific commercial codes run on their own statutory clocks).

Tolling considerations: partial payments toll the period from the date of payment; written acknowledgments toll; out-of-state debtors may face NJ's borrowing statute N.J.S.A. 2A:14-22source imposing shorter foreign limitations; contractual modifications may shorten the period by agreement. We screen claims at the consultation for limitations issues before incurring collection costs.

The collections process.

Most collection matters move through the same sequence, but the goal at every stage is to recover the debt at the lowest cost and in the shortest time, not to litigate for its own sake. The earlier a case resolves, the more of the recovery the client keeps. That is why the demand and negotiation steps come first and why a large share of matters never reach a courtroom — litigation is the tool we use when a debtor who can pay refuses to, not the default starting point.

1. Pre-litigation demand. Formal written demand specifying the debt amount, due date, contractual basis, consequences of non-payment. Many cases resolve at this stage. 10-30 day response window.
2. Pre-filing negotiation. Lump-sum settlement at discount; structured payment plan with default-acceleration; secured arrangement with collateral.
3. Court selection. Special Civil Part ($0-$20,000); Law Division ($20,000+); federal court (diversity jurisdiction with $75,000+ amount in controversy).
4. Complaint and service. Verified complaint; service under R. 4:4source personal service or alternative methods. Service often the practical bottleneck.
5. Answer or default. 35-day answer deadline in Law Division; 30 days in Special Civil; 21 days in federal court. Default judgment available where unanswered.
6. Contested litigation. Discovery; motion practice (often summary judgment under R. 4:46source); trial. Many cases resolve at motion stage.
7. Judgment. Money judgment with prejudgment interest; recoverable attorney's fees where contractually or statutorily provided; costs. Judgment recorded under N.J.S.A. 2A:16-1source becomes a lien on debtor's NJ real property.
8. Post-judgment enforcement. Wage execution, bank levy, property liens, supplementary proceedings, charging orders, receiver appointment, turnover orders, contempt.

Post-judgment enforcement mechanisms.

Winning a judgment and collecting on it are two different problems. A money judgment is a court's finding that the debt is owed; on its own it moves no money. New Jersey gives the judgment-creditor a deep set of tools to convert that finding into payment, and the strategy lies in choosing the mechanism that fits where the debtor's assets actually are — wages, a bank account, real estate, an ownership interest in a business. The tools below are the ones we use most:

• Wage execution under N.J.S.A. 2A:17-50source and R. 4:59-1source. Court order directing debtor's employer to withhold wages within state and federal limits. Federal CCPA limits under 15 U.S.C. § 1673source also apply.
• Bank levy via writ of execution. The court issues a writ to the sheriff; the sheriff serves the bank; the bank freezes and turns over reachable funds, subject to the debtor's exemption claims. Certain deposits are generally protected from levy — including Social Security, unemployment, child-support, and disability benefits — so the practical question is how much of an account is actually reachable, not whether an account exists.
• Real-property liens under N.J.S.A. 2A:16-1source. A judgment docketed with the Clerk of the Superior Court generally becomes a lien on the debtor's New Jersey real property. The lien ordinarily continues for the statutory period and can be satisfied when the property is sold or refinanced, or in appropriate cases pursued through foreclosure — which is why a docketed judgment against a property-owning debtor is often the most durable enforcement position a creditor can hold.
• Supplementary proceedings under R. 6:7-2source (Special Civil) and R. 4:59-1source (Law Division). Debtor required to appear and answer questions under oath about assets, employment, accounts, interests. Information directs execution.
• Receiver appointment. For business debtors — court appoints receiver to take control, collect receivables, apply proceeds to judgment.
• Charging orders against LLC/partnership interests under N.J.S.A. 42:2C-43source. Distributions otherwise payable to debtor-member redirected to creditor.
• Turnover orders. Specific assets in debtor's possession ordered to be turned over to sheriff for sale.
• Contempt. Where a debtor disobeys a court order — for example, refusing to appear for a court-ordered information subpoena or deposition — civil-contempt proceedings may become available; sanctions can escalate, in extreme and limited circumstances, up to coercive incarceration.

Multi-state and federal collections.

Commercial debtors rarely keep their assets neatly inside one state's borders, so collection work routinely crosses jurisdictional lines. A New Jersey judgment does not automatically reach assets in another state, and a judgment from another state or a federal court does not automatically operate here — each direction requires a domestication step. The mechanisms below are the ones that make a judgment portable:

• NJ judgments enforced elsewhere. Uniform Enforcement of Foreign Judgments Act in destination state; foreign-state mechanisms become available.
• Foreign judgments brought into NJ. Domestication under N.J.S.A. 2A:49A-25 et seq.source — file with NJ Superior Court, provide notice, receive full faith and credit. Debtor may contest on personal-jurisdiction, due-process, or fraud grounds.
• Federal judgments. Registration under 28 U.S.C. § 1963source; federal or state-court enforcement.
• Long-arm jurisdiction over out-of-state debtors under R. 4:4-4source based on minimum-contacts analysis.
• Asset location. NJ debts plus out-of-state assets require coordinated strategy with local counsel.

Fee structures.

There is no single right way to pay for collection work, because the right structure depends on the shape of the case — how strong the liability is, how collectible the debtor is, how many matters are in the portfolio, and how much risk the client wants to carry versus shift to the firm. We talk through these structures at the consultation and recommend the one that fits, rather than defaulting every matter to an hourly clock:

• Hourly representation for substantive litigation, particularly contested-liability cases.
• Contingency fee (a percentage of recovery, varying with the stage at which the matter resolves and its complexity) where liability is strong but collectibility is uncertain and the client prefers to align the firm's fee with actual recovery.
• Hybrid hourly-plus-contingency aligning incentives while limiting client out-of-pocket.
• Modified flat-fee per stage for high-volume creditor portfolios.
• Recoverable fees under contractual or statutory fee-shifting (N.J.S.A. 2A:15-59.1source, plus prevailing-party clauses in the underlying contract). Where the contract or a statute shifts fees to the losing party, a successful recovery can offset a meaningful part of the client's own legal cost — so reading the contract's fee provision at the outset can change whether a modest claim is worth pursuing at all.

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