Menu 13: Legal

If an account is not paid, an agency may choose to take legal action against the account to collect the debt and/or fees. These accounts are referred to as legal accounts.

Collecting on legal accounts can be an expensive undertaking due to the complexity of the legal process, but it also offers the possibility for greater profits. If an agency wins a judgment, they have access to many post-judgment collection tools otherwise not available, such as wage garnishment.

In The Collector System, you can manage legal accounts using a combination of account flow tools such as status codes, desks, and strategies. The process of managing and working legal accounts varies greatly from agency to agency, but legal accounts are normally removed from the general collection workflow process and placed in a legal workflow process. Part of the legal workflow process usually consists of setting up a specified legal desk in the system where legal accounts can be placed and using specific status codes to move them into the legal workflow process.

The Collector System uses many of the same functions for working both legal and non-legal accounts. You can update, post, and work legal accounts from the Legal menu (13), but you can also perform these actions on legal accounts using the Data Entry menu (1) and the Collector menu (5) using the legal commands. In addition to the features that are applicable to non-legal accounts, you can also create calendars to track court dates and timelines for collecting on your legal accounts.

Menu options overview

The following table describes each of the submenus of the Legal menu. Click the menu link to go to the topics for that menu number.

Menu	Description
13.1 - Setup	Routines to set up the parameters, standards, codes, and criteria for working legal accounts.
13.2 - Inquiry	Search for and view information about legal accounts.
13.3 - Rpts/Correspondence	Print legal reports and set up and generate legal correspondence.
13.4 - Update Routines	Routines to add and change legal account records.
13.5 - Help	Information for each of the legal menu options.
13.6 - Court Definition	Routines to set up courts for legal processing.