I came to this work the slow way — and that is the only way it works.
I started in the early 2000s doing fraud investigations for insurance defense firms. The cases that stayed with me were the ones that ended the same way: a plaintiff with a judgment, a defendant who had quietly restructured everything three months before trial, and a collection file that sat in a drawer for nine years until it was renewed and sat for nine more. I spent the next decade learning what the drawer looked like from the other side.
By 2012 I had a BSIS license and a narrow practice: California judgment enforcement research, billed flat-fee, delivered on a ten-day turnaround for most engagements. I stopped taking criminal defense work. I stopped taking matrimonial. I stopped taking anything that was not a post-judgment civil matter with a licensed California attorney on the other side of the engagement letter. Narrowness is the whole point of the practice.
"A California judgment is valid for ten years, renewable once. That sounds like a long time — until the debtor moves the house into a family LLC and opens a bank you have never seen. The work is not hard. It is just patient." — From a methodology memo to a San Mateo firm, 2024
What changed in the last few years was the Peninsula. Silicon Valley compensation moved from W-2 wages to equity structures your writ cannot touch the same way. A founder's net worth sits in SAFEs, RSUs, carry interests, and SPVs that are technically owned by entities that are technically controlled by other entities. The standard bank-and-wage playbook misses most of it. Peninsula enforcement work became its own subspecialty, and I built the practice around it.