§ 9-12-133.Filing of foreign judgment; notice to judgment debtor; Code Section 9-11-4 inapplicable to article

Filing a foreign judgment skips the summons-and-complaint machinery that opens an ordinary lawsuit, but the debtor still has to learn that a judgment has landed in a Georgia court. This section builds the notice system that stands in for formal service.

Two mandatory steps follow the filing. The creditor, or the creditor’s attorney, must file an affidavit giving the debtor’s and the creditor’s names and last known post office addresses. The clerk must then promptly mail the debtor notice of the filing at that address, note the mailing on the docket, and include the creditor’s name and address, plus the name and address of the creditor’s Georgia attorney if the creditor has one. The creditor may also mail a duplicate notice directly to the debtor and file proof that it was mailed. That second option matters: if the clerk’s own notice never goes out or goes astray, the creditor’s proof of its own mailing keeps the enforcement proceedings from stalling.

The section also settles a question that could otherwise cause confusion. Subsection (c) states that Code Section 9-11-4, Georgia’s general statute governing service of process in civil actions, does not apply to this article — the affidavit-and-mailed-notice system in subsections (a) and (b) is the notice mechanism for a filed foreign judgment, not a supplement to formal process service.

One category of filing skips even this notice system. When a guardianship or conservatorship order from another state is registered under the separate Title 29 procedure for those orders, subsections (a) and (b) do not apply, and that registration follows its own notice rules instead.