A debtor company presented our client (the lender) with a net worth statement of $12 million by its owner, who personally guaranteed the debt. Two years later the company defaulted, and the owner claimed he was down to $1 million, offering a settlement of 10 cents on the dollar. We found that not only was he worth far more than $1 million, but that he had also failed to include lots of wonderful assets on the original net worth statement he provided to back up his guarantee.

Settlement prospects improved by more than $2 million. Our bill was $5,000.

The debtor’s holdings were complicated. He owned around a third of more than two-dozen companies, each of which held a six-store shopping center over three states in the northeast. We needed to go through each holding to determine his equity because each holding was indebted to various extents.

The big find was a limited liability company not originally on his net worth statement. We found this through an address linked to the man on databases. This address turned out to be a 20-storey office building he had sold the previous week through his company. That sale would likely have been found to be a fraudulent conveyance if he had not decided to settle with our clients.