Amy J. Funchess

I own a contracting company and have known Ms. Funchess for over 10 years and although I knew she was an attorney was unaware until recently that she specialized in debt and collections. When I recently learned that this was her specialty I had a customer who had owed my contracting company close to... $2000 for more than a year! The problem wasn’t that the customer debated owing us money, she just told us every time we contacted her that she was going to send payment. After a while she simply stopped taking our calls or returning our emails. After a short phone call with Amy about the situation she gave me a couple of options to pursue the debt based on how much I wanted to spend, I decided to go with the least expensive option which was an attorney written demand for payment letter that we would mail and email to the client. This obviously took the least amount of time (and cost) but I was also told it might not be enough to collect payment from someone who had withheld for so long. Long story short her letter was inexpensive and very effective as we got a call followed by a cashier’s check from the client within a week of her receiving the letter. Amy thanks so much for your help! We will definitely call you again when we need help collecting.

I hired Amy to handle collection money from my EX. I had a notice that I wanted someone to take over on. She never gave me an invoice or anything and when I asked for one she got all emotional and sent me a bill and said if I didn't pay it she will take collection action against me, which never hap...pened. You are better off finding a better attorney for the same price as she charges the same rate as a lot of large firm attorneys, but she's in a office by herself or maybe one other person.

I went through a high conflict divorce where my ex-wife eventually abducted my son to Japan and became a fugitive. Before the abduction, I went through an insane amount of litigation. During the process I started accumulating significant awards against my ex-wife due to her intransigence and aggressi...ve litigation. And of course, she never paid anything that was owed, forcing me to go to collections in the first place. Originally I had hired a different collection lawyer that billed hourly and I was faced with dis-proportionally high bills compared to what was being collected. I was really unhappy with that service so I looked for someone else and found Amy. What I like about Amy is her ability to perform work at a flat rate + disbursements. Everything is defined and paid upfront, and then eventually the money is collected and sent to me. But the process can be quite lengthy, generally taking 3-6 months per action, depending on the situation. Before the abduction occurred, Amy garnished my ex-wife's paychecks. But after she fled, we had to change our tactics. We started going after her bank accounts and were successful in each case. Ex-wife had a nice Lexus as well which showed up on the radar after being impounded and flagging the arrest warrant. There was a race between my ex-wife attempting to sell the car through her local friend and me trying to possess it. Given the strange circumstances and the fact that I was still on title to the car, I took it out of impound myself, got new keys made for it, insurance, registration, stashed it in a storage place -- because a car repo action is time consuming -- more than a month. Once the car was secured, Amy handled everything else to get the car sold and auction and get me paid. If I hadn't been on the registration, I likely would have lost that race. My only note for improvement on Amy is for her to keep clients better informed -- even just brief update emails would be nice. Collections is a nasty niche of horror from a client's perspective. There is a lot of risk and reward here -- you pay money up front and you may or may not be successful, and the process is completely different for garnishments, account seizures, and asset repos. There is a lot of uncertainty about next steps and approaches from a client's perspective. Overall Amy has done good work at a good price. While results will vary -- my overall cost to collect has been approximately 15-20 cents on the dollar, which is remarkably good. I think she is a bargain compared to other collection lawyers out there and I've used her for at least 4 collection actions so far and will continue to use her in the future.

We forward collection claims to attorney's all over the country and Amy is the only attorney we use in Washington. She handles our cases quickly and efficiently, and she is very diligent with post judgment collection. We have found Amy and her firm to be extremely capable and professional and we have... every intention of continuing our relationship with them.