New developments for the order for payment procedure

When you have not been able to recover amicably (after a reminder, then a formal notice) a sum of money owed to you, for example by a client, you can use the order for payment procedure. Fast, simple and inexpensive, this procedure allows you to obtain an order from a judge that orders your debtor to pay his invoice and then authorizes you to proceed, if necessary, with the seizure of his assets.

For it to be faster and more efficient, this procedure has been modified. These changes are effective for the order for payment orders issued since 1st September.

First of all, it should be remembered that to initiate an order for payment procedure, you just have to send a request to the clerk of the commercial court or the judicial court, as the case may be, in the jurisdiction in which your debtor is registered or resides. If the judge considers that your request is well founded, he or she will, in principle, issue an order ordering your debtor to pay his or her debt. You must then have an enforcement agent (known in France as a “commissioner of justice”) serve the debtor with a copy of the court order.

3 months instead of 6 months to serve the order for payment

First change to the procedure: until now, the order for payment order had to be served (known as “service” of the order) to the debtor within 6 months. This period is reduced to 3 months. This is obviously likely to speed up the process.

Informing the creditor of the debtor’s objection

After receiving the order for payment, the debtor may decide to pay. But if he does not agree on the existence or the amount of the claim, he may also, within one month of receipt of the order, contest it by filing an objection before the court that issued it. Second change: from now on, unless the procedure takes place before the commercial court, the clerk of the court notifies the creditor of this objection within one month of its receipt, which was not the case before, because it was the creditor who had to ask the clerk for a “certificate of absence of opposition”.

If the proceedings take place before the commercial court, the creditor is informed of the debtor’s objection via the registrar’s request to deposit the costs of the proceedings relating to the opposition.

This information by the registrar of the debtor’s objection allows the creditor to quickly switch to proceedings before the court, which, again, is likely to avoid a loss of time.

2 months to continue the enforcement of the order for payment

Until then, if the debtor did not contest the order for payment within the one-month period but did not pay his debt for all that, the creditor was then entitled to enforce the order and therefore to have his assets seized, but having previously requested from the registry a “certificate of absence of opposition”. And obtaining this certificate could take some time...

The logic is now reversed: if, at the end of a period of 2 months after the service of the order for payment, the creditor has not received any notice of objection from the registrar or an invitation to deposit the costs of the opposition, he can have the order enforced. Another measure of simplification and efficiency that is intended to accelerate the recovery of the debt.