Month four, and the file has not moved.
You retained the firm three months ago. The monthly fee has cleared every cycle since, the updates have arrived on schedule, and the MCA balance stands where it stood on the day of the engagement. The funder has heard from your representatives once, perhaps, with nothing behind the contact. The confession of judgment sits unchallenged. The UCC lien remains where it was filed. When you call for a status report you receive warmth, apology, reassurance, and nothing a creditor would recognize as pressure. A slow process would at least be moving. What you are paying for has the cadence of work without any of its weight.
Updates That Contain No Information
The first sign is the update itself. Read the most recent messages the firm sent you and mark anything in them that a stranger could verify. Work continues on your file. Negotiations are progressing. We expect movement soon. Language of this kind is a placeholder, and a placeholder reports nothing; its function is to keep the engagement warm until the next invoice issues. An update from a firm that is doing the work reads otherwise: we sent the funder a written offer on Tuesday, the funder answered in writing, and both letters are attached for your records. Only one of those versions can be checked against a document, and it is never the version you have been receiving.
Correspondence You Are Never Shown
The second sign is documentary. Settlement offers, counteroffers, letters that contest the contract terms: if none of this has crossed your desk, you hold no evidence that any of it exists. Ask for copies of everything sent on your behalf. A firm with a live negotiation produces its file without ceremony, because the file is the product. If the answer is that the talks have been verbal, sit with that answer for a moment. Funders paper everything; the collection model depends on the record, and their counsel writes as if every letter will one day be read by a judge. A negotiation that leaves no trace is, in our experience, a negotiation that did not occur. We have seen exceptions. They were not happy ones.
The Estimate That Keeps Moving
The third sign lives in the calendar. Every projection the firm offered at intake has since been revised, and every revision moved outward. Sixty days became one hundred twenty. The assigned attorney had a scheduling conflict; the funder turned difficult; the market shifted. Any one of those explanations may be true, and some weeks all of them are. When every deadline is missed and every explanation points away from the firm, the pattern tells you what the original estimates were for. They were instruments of the sale, fashioned to secure your signature, with no work plan standing behind them. A deadline invented to win an engagement will keep retreating for as long as the fees keep clearing. Most clients stop asking before they stop paying, and the firms know the order in which those two things happen.
