Rule 69.Execution

Rule 69(a) keeps the civil rules out of the weeds of collecting on a judgment. Process to enforce a judgment for the payment of money runs by whatever procedures state statutes provide, and the same is true for proceedings supplementary to and in aid of a judgment and for proceedings on and in aid of execution. Rather than building its own execution machinery, the rule defers to the statutory scheme that already governs how a judgment gets collected.

Rule 69(b) gives the judgment creditor a tool for finding assets to collect against. To aid in satisfying a judgment of more than one hundred dollars, the judgment creditor may examine the judgment debtor, or any other person, about any non-privileged matter relating to the debtor's property, including that person's books, papers, or documents. The creditor has two avenues for doing this: examining the debtor or another person in open court as provided by statute, or using the discovery procedures set out in Rules 26 through 37 — depositions, interrogatories, document requests, and the rest of the ordinary discovery toolkit, redirected toward finding what the debtor owns.

Together, the two subdivisions divide the work sensibly: the statutes handle the actual seizure and application of assets to the judgment, while Rule 69(b) makes sure the judgment creditor has a real way to find those assets in the first place, whether through a statutory examination or through the discovery rules already familiar from the rest of the case.