Debt letters they can’t ignore

Technology-driven Debt Recovery

Our capability

We can establish digital infrastructure that allows you to automatically generate debt letters on a firm letterhead. It’s a digital approach that has been adopted by many debt collection agencies, but lawyers have been slow to adopt the technology for various practical and commercial reasons.

How it’s different

Traditional approaches to an automated debt recovery service have faced push back from the legal professional regulatory framework and the Courts. Our approach has learned from these cases and carefully navigates the regulatory landscape to offer you the best balance between convenience and the responsibilities required under the legal professional rules.

In essence, we evaluate your current Accounts Receivable workflow and understand how your current software stack is connected. We then propose an integration with one of our technology platforms that will allow you to easily instruct us on a debt recovery matter by uploading the particulars of the debt and generating debt letters for our approval. A lawyer from our side can then review the package and have it sent off promptly and chase the debt through to recovery.

Why it’s faster

This approach results in a tighter integration between your Accounts Receivable department and us, and presents a shorter pathway from when a debt becomes overdue and a solicitor taking action. This is a better and faster alternative to using a debt recovery service and is especially helpful if you don’t want to write off part of the debt. You won’t need a debt recovery service as an intermediate step, you can go straight to solicitors without the traditional high costs.

Streamlined digital debt recovery

Once setup, our digital platform allows you to run through the simple steps outlined below to have your debt recovered, from initial letter of demand through to enforcement proceedings. Many of the steps can be automated based on the quality of data present in your data pipeline.

Upload Debt Particulars & Identification

Provide your debt particulars and identification of debtor information to the platform. We can pull this through via integration from your accounting system and from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to automate the step.

Generating Letters

Once the debtor is sufficiently identified, the particulars of the debt can be used to generate a recovery letter with our letterhead. We provide a simple questionnaire interface that allows for clients to identify the nature of the debt and generate the corresponding demand letters. If your technology system (CRM or Accounting system) stores the metadata that will answer these questions, we can similarly transform the data and the answers can be given automatically.

Solicitor review & Authority

Once the letters are generated, our solicitors will be prompted through an automated workflow to pick up the matter, review the letters and issue them. This oversight step is critical in meeting requirements of the professional conduct rules and meeting the expectations of Courts and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

Send & Prosecute

Once approved by the solicitor of record for the debt, the letters are sent and a follow up occurs. Unlike a traditional debt recovery process, your debtor cannot argue that the debt is contested as a delay tactic. We deal with both contested and uncontested debts and the solicitor review process steps will help equip us to deal with these types of arguments coming from debtors.

If your debtor does not satisfactorily resolve the debt, we can be instructed to proceed to enforcement proceedings. This can be done as a manual step or can be pre-authorised as part of the workflow we put together for your organisation. This involves preparation, filing and service of proceedings in the appropriate Court depending on the nature of the debt.

Enforcement

There are various jurisdictional strategies that are appropriate for debt recovery depending on the nature of any security interests you hold, the type of enforcement proceedings you want (such as garnishee orders, bankruptcy or winding up of a company) and the information known about the assets of the debtor.

Enforcement proceedings are typically where the automation steps become inappropriate, as there’s generally a need to take the individual circumstances of the debtor and the debt into consideration. A judgment call must be made on the type of orders to seek from the Court, weighed against the risks and benefits of the competing approaches. We can assist you to weigh these options and adopt the most pragmatic enforcement approach.