We help you transfer your Australian Judgment to England, so that you can recover what’s owed to you from assets in the UK.
If you have an Australian Judgment against a person or a company that has assets in the UK, you can transfer your Judgment to the England and Wales jurisdiction in the UK (which we refer to as England), using a simple process, which is outlined here.
England has a raft of very useful enforcement measures, including freezing bank accounts and forced sales of property. For more details see here.
How We Can Help
We will look after the whole process for you. We can act for you directly or through your Solicitor in Australia.
Our team of English-qualified solicitors will make sure that you take the right action to recover the money owed to you from the UK assets of the debtor.
Please contact us to arrange a free meeting.
How Much and How Long?
The first point we would like to make is that speaking to us is:
FREE
You can call and speak to one of our specialist solicitors about your issue without charge or obligation.
We will do what we can to help you: give you an assessment of your individual matter, information about the court process, information on costs and useful next steps to take. Our first meeting can be up to an hour long, with a chance to speak again if you have any further questions.
Our charges
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If you would like to instruct us, we will charge based only on the time we spend on your matter.
Our hourly charging rate is AUS$350 per hour.
We will ask for a payment on account to be made of AUS$2,250. We will give you details of a bank account in Australia to make the payment to, so you don’t have to worry about bank charges or changes in the exchange rate.
We will give you an estimate of costs for each stage of your case. We will let you know before we reach that estimate if we need to revise it and will only increase it if you agree.
No two cases are the same. So, we will give you an estimate of costs that is based on the unique facts of your case. As a guideline though, we estimate that obtaining a transfer of an Australian Judgment to an English judgment will take 10 to 20 hours of our time plus a court Fee of around AUS$500.
Helping you transfer an Australian Judgment
Do you have the right kind of Judgment?
Court rules stipulate that only specific kinds of Judgment can be transferred to England from Australia.
- It must be a Judgment from a recognised court. See here for a list of the appropriate courts in Australia.
- It must be a final Judgment, that is not subject to appeal and must be for money that is still owed to you. For more details see here.
Send us a copy of your judgment in strict confidence and we will let you know if it is capable of being transferred to England.
What UK assets does the debtor have?
The point of transferring the Judgment is to receive payment of your debt. If you already know what assets the debtor has in the UK, you can move forward with court proceedings.
If you have information that the debtor may have assets in the UK, but you are not sure, we will conduct a search through a trusted partner to establish if the debtor owns any property or has any shares in companies or bank accounts.
With our assistance, you can decide if you want to continue; when you have this information.
Court proceedings: how long will it take?
To register the Judgment, an application must be made to the High Court. We will ensure that the application is accurate and thorough. We may need to contact you for information on more than one occasion.
Depending on any request for further information, we aim to complete the application, have it approved, signed and filed with the court within ten days of being instructed.
Once filed with the court, we are dependent on their workload. The High Court is the most efficient court in the country, but due to the high volume of work the High Court Masters (Judges) deal with, it can take some weeks for the application to be considered, approved and returned to us.
When does the debtor know that you are chasing the debt in the UK?
The Court will consider the application to register your judgment on a “without notice” basis, which means that the debtor does not need to know that you are making the application – if you don’t want them to.
Once the Registration Order has been obtained, you must serve it on the debtor and provide them with a timeframe (usually 14 or 28 days) to make an application to set the order aside.
Thereafter, you are free to enforce the Judgment (with interest and costs) using whichever of the enforcement options available in England best suit the circumstances. See here.
How much will it cost?
If you would like to instruct us, we will charge based only on the time we spend on your matter.
Our hourly charging rate is AUS$350 per hour.
We will ask for a payment on account to be made of AUS$2,250. We will give you details of a bank account in Australia to make the payment to, so you don’t have to worry about bank charges or changes in the exchange rate.
We will give you an estimate of costs for each stage of your case. We will let you know before we reach that estimate if we need to revise it and will only increase it if you agree.
No two cases are the same. So, we will give you an estimate of costs that is based on the unique facts of your case. As a guideline though, we estimate that obtaining a transfer of an Australian Judgment to an English judgment will take 10 to 20 hours of our time plus a court Fee of around AUS$500.
Please contact us, without charge or obligation, to discuss your Judgment and our fees.
The UK’s Civil Jurisdictions
The UK, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What’s it all about?
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, usually called the UK, is the formal name of the nation.
Within the UK there are four “Home Nations”. These are England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The four Home Nations are divided into three legal jurisdictions. These are i) England and Wales, ii) Scotland and iii) Northern Ireland.
We are solicitors that practice in the England and Wales jurisdiction, which is by far the largest by population, being about seven times bigger than Scotland and Northern Ireland combined.
If an Australian Judgment is registered in England and Wales, it is a simple process to have it transferred to either of the other two jurisdictions.
If you are seeking to recover a debt from assets that you know are in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you should go to lawyers in those jurisdictions. If you’re not sure where the debtor’s assets are, we can help you find out.