§ 481.020.Account Debtor

Rather than write its own definition, § 481.020 borrows one directly from the Commercial Code’s secured-transactions article (Section 9102). An account debtor is not a party to the lawsuit — it is the person who owes money to the defendant on an account, a piece of chattel paper, or a general intangible. That distinction matters once a case moves past this definitions chapter: when a plaintiff attaches a defendant’s accounts receivable, the levying officer typically must give notice to the account debtors themselves, since they are the ones who owe the money the attachment is trying to reach.

Borrowing the Commercial Code definition keeps the Attachment Law aligned with commercial and secured-lending practice, so a business’s receivables and intangibles are described the same way whether the dispute is about a security interest or a prejudgment attachment.