Reviews

 With a judgment in Texas an $10 you can buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks I think it would be safe to say that as a general rule, attorneys who represent debtors in bankruptcy are not natural allies with court-appointed receivers. Nevertheless, I’m here to sing the praises of Bill Hammer. And here’s why: 

     Back between 1996 & 2001 I had a legal assistant/office manager who embezzled roughly $300,000.00. The theft was not discovered until after she left and moved to Houston from Longview, Texas. 

     The next several years were spent trying to reconstruct my financial records to figure out how much was missing. Then, between 2004 and spring of 2005, we worked with my civil attorney and the local district attorney to try to resolve the situation. Finally, in April of 2005, facing the prospect of being indicted by the DA, she finally made an offer to settle that I accepted. The settlement involved a lump sum payment followed by monthly payments for about 5 years. However, after about two years of sporadic payments, she stopped making payments altogether, and I had to sue her. I got a default judgment for the remaining balance and my attorneys recorded abstracts of judgment in three counties where she and her parents might have owned property. Sadly, as referred to in the title, collecting on judgments in Texas can be very difficult and frustrating due to the generous exemptions allowed to Texas residents (when I first heard that old saying, back when I was in law school in the late 1970s, the amount needed for coffee ranged from 25 cents to 50 cents). So, for the next several years, she was able to sit in the house in Houston that I unknowingly paid the down payment on, and give me the finger while reinventing herself as a financial advisor and insurance agent. 

     Then one day, a man came into my office to discuss filing bankruptcy to help him save his business. His immediate problem was that the next day was payday, and his bank account was frozen by a receiver. As a stopgap measure I called the receiver, Bill Hammer, to discuss the situation. After we visited for a while, I asked if there was any way for him to release enough money to make payroll. Bill said he didn’t want to do that for the fear that the man would turn around and file bankruptcy. I assured Bill that if the money was released, that I wouldn’t do that and we would try to work out a payment plan. So, much against his better judgment, he agreed to lift his hold of the bank account. 

     I expected the man to come back the next week and retain me to help him negotiate with Bill. Instead, I never heard back from the man. A few days later, I got a call from Bill. He was fuming. As I recall, his greeting was, “that son-of-a-bitch filed bankruptcy.” I said no, I hadn’t filed a bankruptcy for him, and, in fact, hadn’t heard from him. Bill then informed me that the guy had gone to another lawyer and hired him to file for him. I was shocked. 

     After we spent some time commiserating about dirty, lying s.o.b’s, we started talking about what he did as a receiver, and some of the extraordinary rights and powers he can use to collect judgments. 

     Sometime later, I discussed with my attorneys the possibility of having a receiver appointed to help collect on my judgment. They agreed that it might be worth a try, so I reached out to Bill to see if he would be interested in taking my case. 

     He agreed to do so, and as they say, the rest is history. The first thing he did was to sic his granddaughter, Samantha Hammer, aka his designated cyber-stalker, on to my ex-employee. Shortly after Sam went into action, I got a call from Bill. He was laughing his ass off as he described the phone call he had received from the woman’s new husband. It seems Sam had located a joint bank account in a bank in Alaska, where the woman now lived. He regaled me with his recounting of their conversation. Needless to say, New Hubby wasn’t happy. Sometime later, we found out that she had inherited a house and 1 acre from her mother in 2016. Bill promptly asked the judge for an order allowing him to sell the property. However, after getting the order to sell, Bill realized that the property was so remote and difficult to access, that selling it would be almost impossible and would not pay off the judgment. 

     But then the situation got really interesting. A title search revealed that part of the reason it would be hard to sell was because the property was virtually surrounded by two 40-acre tracts of pine trees that her mother had also owned at the time of her death that had been divided and deeded to her two brothers after her mother’s death. Evidently no consideration was given to the fact that when her mother passed, my judgment lien attached to the entire 82 acres. 

     Since both brothers had subsequently sold their respective 40-acre tracts to two unsuspecting third parties, the situation was about to get REALLY intense. 

     First, Bill sent letters to the woman and both brothers outlining the situation and explaining that if they didn’t figure out a way to get me paid, he was going to sue all three of them AND the buyers of the two 40-acre tracts. 

     Though his letter didn’t result in settlement negotiation, it did result in Bill receiving a phone call from one of her brothers saying he hadn’t known anything about his sister’s shenanigans. In other words: As they say in the Mafia: “I don’t know nothin about nothin” or as we say here in Texas “Me no Alamo.” 

     So being a man of his word, Bill sued everyone, including the folks who bought the land from the brothers. 

     In addition to laying out the long, ugly history of the case, the complaint also outlined the applicable statutes from the Texas Probate Code & Property Code supporting the theory that my judgment lien attached not just to all the real estate, but also to the proceeds of the sale, arguing that the money that the brothers received constituted a constructive trust for my benefit. 

     It also alleged conspiracy between the three siblings to commit fraud. 

     The lawsuit was filed mid-summer, 2022. Within a few weeks, we received an email from the woman’s new attorney, saying she had been instructed to settle the matter. 

     After several weeks of negotiation, an agreement was reached whereby she would pay the entire amount of the original judgment plus interest, all of my attorney fees over the past nearly twenty years, and all of Bill’s costs plus his 25% commission, in three lump sum payments totaling $146,000.00 over a period of five months. FYI: the original judgment was roughly $47,000.00. As wonderful as the overall results were, one of the sweetest parts was the phone call I received from one of my first attorneys, who had to withdraw from the case when he became a judge. He was so pleased that we had finally received justice after so long. 

     So, while in Texas, with a judgment and $10, you can buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, in my case, with a judgment and Bill & Sam Hammer, I got all my money and the thief who stole it paid over $50,000.00 to cover all my expenses.