1.2 million: that's how many county court judgments were entered in England and Wales in 2025, up 10% on the year before, according to Ministry of Justice figures.

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Here is the number that should worry the profession more. Over the same period, warrants issued and enforcement related applications fell to their lowest levels since 2020.

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Judgments are rising. Enforcement is falling. Which means an ever larger pile of judgment debt is sitting on file as paper: won in court, worth nothing at the bank.

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At Towerhall Solutions we thought long and hard about why that happens, and the answer is rarely that the money isn't there. It is that the person isn't where the file says they are. We call it the 'goneaway gap', and for legal firms it opens at three separate points in the life of a matter.

Gap one: service

Ninety three percent of the judgments entered in 2025 were default judgments. No defence, no hearing, no contact. In a significant share of those cases, that silence has an unglamorous explanation: the proceedings were served at an address the defendant left months or years ago.

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That is not just a collections problem. It is a litigation risk. A default judgment obtained on service to the wrong address is an invitation to a set aside application, and with it the costs, the delay and the awkward conversation with the client about why the matter is starting again.

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The Civil Procedure Rules expect reasonable steps to be taken to ascertain a defendant's current address before falling back on the 'last known' one. A standard credit reference trace is the reasonable step most firms take. The problem is what that trace actually is.

Gap two: the trace itself

A credit reference agency trace is only as good as the financial footprint sitting behind it. It does not answer "where is this person?" It answers "where is this person's paperwork?" and those are not the same question.

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A defendant who has recently moved, who holds a thin credit file, or whose footprint is anchored to a parent's address, a former tenancy or an old employer will generate a confident result that is confidently wrong. The trace does not error out. It succeeds at finding the wrong thing, and nothing in the report tells you it has done so.

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'Forensic tracing' is a different discipline. It blends the credit footprint with external investigation and field intelligence, cross references beyond the credit file, and corroborates the result before anyone relies on it. Our investigators do not hand back a plausible address. They hand back a verified one, because in litigation the difference between plausible and verified is the difference between good service and a set aside.

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Across every matter type we handle, that approach resolves over 80% of the cases referred to us, including files that had already been through standard tracing and come back marked goneaway.

Gap three: enforcement

The judgment is entered. Now it has to be worth something. A writ or warrant of control needs a current address. An attachment of earnings needs a current employer. A charging order needs to find the property. Every enforcement route runs through the same question the original trace was supposed to answer, except now the trail is months colder.

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This is where the numbers turn. Industry data suggests that in some portfolios nearly half of recorded addresses are out of date, and every month a file sits marked goneaway the trail cools further. Speed is the multiplier: a verified address delivered in days rather than months is frequently the difference between a recovered judgment and a written off one.

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Consider the arithmetic on a typical stalled book. A firm holding 300 post judgment files at an average balance of £3,000 is sitting on £900,000 of judgment debt going nowhere. If forensic tracing resolves even the majority of those to verified, actionable addresses, the recoverable value unlocked runs to hundreds of thousands of pounds, on matters the firm had already won.

Good outcomes on both sides of the file

There is a point here that the profession does not make often enough. Accurate tracing is not only good for the client. It is good for the customer, and for the people who are not the customer at all.

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Every letter of claim and every enforcement visit that goes to a wrong address lands on someone: a new occupant, a relative, a stranger who now has to prove they are not the debtor. Verified tracing takes innocent people out of the firing line entirely.

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And for the genuine debtor, being found earlier is almost always the better outcome. Contact made at the right address, at the pre action stage, means a conversation, a payment plan and a resolution before costs escalate and enforcement hardens. 'Fair Outcomes' are not in tension with recovery. Done properly, they are the same thing.

Why Towerhall

We have been doing this since 1999. In that time we have recovered £97m for more than 70 institutions and legal entities, at a 80% tracing success rate, working to the standard the legal sector requires: fully compliant, court ready reporting, and precision and discretion on every case.

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Firms already in our network include litigation and insolvency teams who send us the files their standard process could not resolve. Those files are where we do our best work.

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A word from Glenn

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"Our founders, Rob and Neil, set this business up in 1999 on a simple conviction: that 'untraceable' usually means nobody has looked properly yet. Twenty seven years on, that conviction has held. If your firm is holding judgments you cannot enforce, or matters you cannot serve, the money is very often still there. It is just not where the standard trace told you to look.

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Because I would rather show you than tell you, we offer special introductory rates to new clients. Send us a sample of your goneaway files, at a rate that makes the decision easy, and judge us on what comes back. That is how most of our longest standing client relationships started.

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I would welcome the conversation."

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Glenn Matthews FCICM Operations Director, Towerhall Solutions

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Get in touch: visit towerhallsolutions.com or connect with Glenn on LinkedIn to ask about introductory rates for new legal sector clients.

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Sources: Ministry of Justice, Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly, October to December 2025 (judgment and enforcement volumes). Address decay figure: industry data. Towerhall performance figures from internal case records.

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