Assignment of Judgment in California

The topic of this article is an assignment of a judgment in the State of California. A judgment creditor in California may assign their judgment to a third person, pursuant to Civil Code Section 954.

Code of Civil Procedure Section 673 states in detail exactly what information must be included on the acknowledgment of assignment of judgment that is filed with the Court. If the acknowledgment of assignment of judgment does not contain the information required by law, the judgment debtor could object to any enforcement actions taken by the assignee of record.

Assignments of judgments in California are now widely used compared to 20 years ago when the author worked in property management and collected Court judgments for his employer.

However the assignment should state that “all right, title and interest” in the judgment is being assigned to avoid any objections as the California Supreme Court has ruled that an assignment of only part of a judgment probably is not valid unless the judgment debtor consents or ratifies the assignment.

All of the assignments of judgment that the author uses in collecting judgments state that “all right, title and interest in the judgment” is being assigned.

An assignment of judgment in California generally transfers all the rights that the judgment creditor had to the assignee of record a California Court of Appeal has stated.

“In doing so, the judgment creditor assigns the debt upon which the judgment is based. Through such an assignment, the assignee ordinarily acquires all the rights and remedies possessed by the assignor for the enforcement of the debt, subject, however, to the defenses that the judgment debtor had against the assignor.”

A California Court of Appeal has ruled that so long as the assignment of judgment complies with the statutory provisions of the Code of Civil Procedure, a judgment debtor cannot object to the legal standing of the assignee of record judgment creditor’s authority to make the assignment.

Visit the following website to view any of the statutes cited in this article,

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html

An exception would be if the assignee of record lacks capacity to enforce the judgment such as an assignee that is a suspended corporation or something similar.

In the author’s more than 20 years of experience in collecting unpaid judgments in the State of California he has had many judgment creditors who “forgot” that they assigned their judgment to someone else, and have attempted to convince the author to take on collection. He has refused as the person who first becomes the assignee of record by filing an acknowledgment of assignment with the court or otherwise has priority, pursuant to Civil Code Section 954.5(b).

The author sincerely hopes that you have enjoyed this article.

Yours Truly,
Stan Burman