What a floor is worth against a contingency fee

Listen instead

The same material, read aloud and told more loosely than it is written. Nothing is said in it that this page does not also say.

That same recording, with the writing lit line by line as it plays and the sections listed beside it, is on its own page.

The fee is a share of a recovery

So the working number in a file is whatever the record can be shown to support. The judgment amount is only the ceiling.

A private investigator asset report runs $250 to $400 in the ordinary case, with bank searches priced separately. A Florida collections firm states the problem plainly on its own site: pursuing a judgment is not always cost effective, and the creditor has to settle collectability first. That is the decision, and everything below makes it out of documents already recorded.

One judgment, one stack

What follows is an illustration. No real matter and no real parcel. The numbers are round so the sum stays easy to check, and a real one sits on the sample report.

Your judgment is $240,000, docketed 2026 in Kings County. The debtor owns one parcel, carried on the roll at $1,100,000. Recorded against it, in order:

• 2014, mortgage, $760,000
• 2021, mortgage, $310,000
• 2025, state tax warrant, $58,000
• 2026, your judgment, $240,000

Recording date sets priority. Everything recorded ahead of you is paid before you are.

Where the floor says pursue

The 2021 mortgage refinanced the 2014 one, and the satisfaction is on file with its own number. Retire it.

• Live claims senior to you: $310,000 plus $58,000, so $368,000
• Market value on the roll: $1,100,000
• Floor on reachable value: $732,000
• Your judgment, $240,000, covered 3.05 times

Now the fee. At a third, collecting the judgment in full is $80,000 to the firm and $160,000 to the client. At 50 percent it is $120,000 each way. Either number tells you what you are spending attorney hours against, which turns the cost ceiling into a figure rather than an instinct. What you then do with it is your ground and your counsel's. We do not touch it.

Where the floor says stop

Same parcel, same judgment, same roll value, same four documents. One fact changes: no satisfaction is on file for the 2014 mortgage.

• Live claims senior to you: $760,000 plus $310,000 plus $58,000, so $1,128,000
• Market value on the roll: $1,100,000
• Floor on reachable value: $0, with recorded senior claims exceeding roll value by $28,000

Nobody writes this half of the page, and it is the half that carries the money. You did not book the examination. On an hourly file that cost stays with the client. On a one third contingency it lands on the firm, which fronted the work and takes a share of zero. Put your own rate in. Six hours of attorney time at $400 is $2,400, before service and the appearance, and before the call where you tell a client there was nothing there.

What a floor of zero does not say

It does not say the debtor has nothing.

We count debt at its recorded face, never at its current balance. A 2014 mortgage with twelve years of payments behind it stands on the report at $760,000 and is almost certainly owed at less. The figure errs low deliberately, because a creditor who acts on an optimistic estimate loses money and a creditor who acts on a floor does not. Every report prints the direction of that error. The magnitude is not quantified, and validation against title searches is still running.

The record has holes, and we publish all of them in what we do not claim. New York County Clerk money judgments are not loaded, so a debtor showing no private judgment may still have been sued. Older satisfactions do not always link, and any parcel whose verdict turns on one is marked on its face. Outside four New York City boroughs nothing is computed at all.

So the second case reads a record. It does not judge a person. What it hands you is an account of what was searched, and of what that search would have caught had anything been there to catch. Deciding to stop is yours.

Florida, where this sum does not run

Two of the most common questions in this market are Florida questions, and the honest answer to both begins with what Florida removes from reach.

Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution exempts homestead from forced sale. That exemption is not general. Four exceptions run through it, repeated at Fla. Stat. 222.01(5)¹: property taxes and assessments, obligations contracted to buy the place, liens for labor or materials that repaired or improved it, and other obligations for labor performed on it. Acreage is capped, 160 acres where the homestead sits outside a town or city (Fla. Stat. 222.03²). Beyond the home, Fla. Stat. 222.25³ exempts $5,000 of a debtor's interest in one motor vehicle, prescribed health aids, an earned income credit refund, and $4,000 of personal property where no homestead exemption is claimed. Wages have their own rule at Fla. Stat. 222.11⁴.

Our Florida side screens homestead against the acreage, residency and ownership tests. It prints the authority beside each verdict, as the method page sets out. It computes no reachable figure anywhere in Florida, because Florida claims tie to a name rather than a lot. Whether a given parcel is that debtor's homestead, and whether your judgment is one of those four exceptions, is a legal question. We print the test. Your counsel answers it.

The cost on your side of the sum

The first report is free, and nothing to book. After that it is $75 a debtor, or a flat monthly rate for everything the firm runs, $1,500 once the pilot year ends.

Read those against the $250 to $400 an investigator charges for an asset report, with bank searches priced on top. We are not going to tell you how the sum comes out on your matters, because that turns on your fee split and on the debtors in front of you. Run three you have already closed and grade the answers against what you know. Send the first three.