There’s no doubting the usefulness of prejudgment remedies under Connecticut law. For commercial creditors in particular, a properly executed waiver can lead directly to an attachment of a debtor’s property without a hearing. For others, prejudgment remedies when timely heard can prevent bank accounts being emptied or real estate being encumbered. This means judgment creditors don’t need to clog the courts with claims about fraudulent transfers during the long haul between filing a lawsuit and winning a judgment. But the process of getting them is dated and should be reformed.

The process still reflects the day when attachments without an adversarial hearing on a finding of probable cause were common and subject to some abuse. In 1991, in Connecticut v. Doehr, that process was held unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. Now ex parte orders only issue on specific extraordinary circumstances, but the paperwork to seek an adversarial hearing is still largely the same. It still takes on the appearance of a kind of emergency that can’t wait for the ordinary business of serving a complaint on a defendant and returning it to court, but then it essentially requires the same thing in reverse by requiring the paperwork to be filed with the court and then served on the defendant. No time really seems to be saved nor does anything about the current process appear beneficial.