We offer two pre-legal collection services to chase debts using pre-legal techniques.
These services involve chasing the debtor by letter and telephone, sending the debtor an un-issued Court Claim Form and reporting back to you and reviewing action at each significant juncture, with a final review to see if you want to move onto our Court Action Services.
Credit checks
- We recommend that we carry out appropriate searches to check the credit rating of your debtor
- Additional fees will be payable for these searches – but we will discuss them with you before they are incurred
The service still enables you take advantage of the Late Payment Legislation which entitles you to add compensation and interest to your debt.
Late Payment Compensation is linked to the size of the debt
- Up to £999.99 you can add £40
- For debts between £1,000 and £9,999.99 you can add £70
- On debts over £10,000 you can add £100
Statutory demands in pre-legal collection
Included in this service is consideration of whether to use a Statutory Demand.
- You can only use a Statutory Demand if the debt is in excess of £750 and you must only use it if you are sure the debt will not be disputed
- A Statutory Demand can be served on both individual debtors and companies and is a direct route to starting insolvency proceedings
- Without a court judgment, before you can serve a bankruptcy or winding up petition upon a debtor, you must serve a statutory demand for the outstanding debt
- If a debtor fails to pay within the time limit then insolvency proceedings may be started against the debtor without notice to the debtor
Once Insolvency proceedings are started, it is likely that the Debtor’s Bank Accounts will be frozen so whilst a Statutory Demand can be a very powerfully collection tool, it has to be used carefully and there are risks of penalties in costs if misused.
Prices
We offer two options for pre-legal collection:
- Light Option – in all cases we charge £50 + VAT for a maximum of 3 letters and 3 telephone calls
- Full Option - unlimited letters and telephone calls until we judge that there are no reasonable chances of success. This option costs £100 + VAT with an additional charge payable only if successful of 5% of the gross sum (including VAT) recovered + VAT. If you pre-authorise any credit checks, process servers or other costs, those fees are payable as additional charges.
If you ask us to issue a Statutory demand we will charge an additional fee of £75 + VAT whether the debt is recovered or not.
If you move from our Light Option to the Full Option, a credit of £50 + VAT will be given against the Full Option cost.
Please contact us to discuss how we can help you.
