The order for payment procedure is accelerating!

When you have been unable to amicably recover (after a reminder and formal notice) a sum of money owed to you, for example by a client, you can use the order for payment procedure. Quick, simple, and inexpensive, this judicial procedure allows you to obtain a court order requiring your debtor to pay their bill and then authorizes you to proceed, if necessary, with the seizure of their assets.

To make it faster and more efficient, this procedure has just been modified

First, remember that to initiate an order for payment procedure, you simply need to send a request to the registry of the commercial court or the judicial court, depending on the case, within whose jurisdiction your debtor is registered or resides. If the judge considers your request to be well-founded, they will issue, in principle a few days later, an order requiring your debtor to pay their debt. You must then send a copy of this order to the debtor by bailiff’s writ.

3 months instead of 6 to notify the payment order

First change to the procedure: currently, the payment order must be notified to the debtor within a period of 6 months. This period is reduced to 3 months. This is obviously likely to speed up the process. But be careful, if the order is not served within this (short) period, it becomes void.

Notification of the creditor of the debtor’s objection

After receiving the payment order, the debtor may decide to pay. But if they disagree with the existence or the amount of the debt, they can also, within one month of receiving the order, contest it by filing an objection with the court that issued it. Here, a second change is introduced: now, unless the procedure is before the commercial court, the court registrar will notify the creditor of this objection within one month of its receipt; this is not currently the case, as the creditor, in the event of an objection filed by the debtor, is summoned by the court for a conciliation attempt within an indefinite period.

This notification by the registrar will therefore allow the creditor to quickly switch to contentious proceedings before the court, which, here again, is likely to avoid a waste of time.

2 months to proceed with enforcement of the payment order

Currently, if the debtor does not contest the payment order within one month but still does not pay their debt, the creditor is then entitled to enforce the order and proceed with seizing their assets. But in practice, the creditor often waits for a response from the registry before doing so.

Consequently, the following third change is expressly provided for: if, at the end of a period of 2 months after service of the payment order, the creditor has not received any notice of objection from the registrar, they may enforce the order. Yet another simplification and efficiency measure that will speed up debt recovery.