A Guide To Small Claims Court

I'm surprised at your conclusion. You appear to have sued on your debt to judgment, levied execution and collected the whole sum in about the shortest time possible, with little friction of any kind and no overhead. How you could have saved either time or money by consulting and paying counsel I do not see at all.

Nor do I see why you feel that you were too hard on the defendant. She had plenty of opportunity to do right by you before you sued. Tenant security deposits are special objections of legal solicitude, and they nonetheless are a disproportionate contributor to the societal dispute level. Your concern for her relationship to her bank is misplaced. In the first place, unless she is a much larger small business than you let on, her chances of actually having a "lender" rather than just a place where she keeps a bank account are small. Below $2 million/year in gross sales, even small business credit cards, let alone small business lines of credit, are simply not available. Liens are an administrative annoyance for banks, which is why they tend to over-respond and force the account-holder to straighten it out by freezing the account. But you won't have caused them to call her loans. Yes, the language barrier had something to do with why she defaulted, in all probability, but she does business in the city on limited English, and she could have managed in court, too.

I think the most promising line of revision is to look more deeply into your own ambivalence about your actions. Intuition tells me that's where something interesting is to be found.