Amy J. Funchess

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.