The whole file hangs on one address

A practice receives an enforceable title. The document is complete as a matter of law: it says who owes what, and it authorises action. It says almost nothing about what you need to know in order to act.

What the title does not say

The judgment names the parties and fixes the debt. It does not say where the debtor lives today, who employs them, or where their accounts are held. The address it carries is the address of proceedings that often ran for months: since then the person has moved, changed employer, closed an account, or simply stopped collecting their post.

That uncertainty is not a mishap. It is the normal starting point of an enforcement file, and French law provides for it. Where the person on whom the document must be served has no known domicile, residence or place of work, the code of civil procedure requires a report to be drawn up setting out precisely the steps taken to find them, with a copy then sent to the last known address.

This report is not filing paperwork. Its value rests on the precision of what it records. Put another way: the quality of a search always ends up being read in a document.

A right to ask, exercised one request at a time

The French enforcement code gives the professional in charge of enforcement, holding an enforceable title, a broad right of disclosure. State, regional, departmental and municipal administrations, undertakings conceded to or controlled by them, and public establishments must disclose the information they hold that makes it possible to determine the debtor’s address, the identity and address of their employer or of any third party holding sums due to them, and the composition of their real property. Institutions that hold accounts must state whether accounts are open in the debtor’s name and where they are held — to the exclusion of any other information, and without being able to invoke professional secrecy.

The right is broad. Exercising it stays stubbornly singular: one request, one recipient, one waiting period, one answer — when it comes. Nothing in that scheme provides for who keeps track of what has been asked, or what becomes of a request that is never answered.

The work is not the request, it is the reconciliation

What weighs on a practice is not writing to a public body. It is everything that follows:

• answers that arrive out of order, long after the request, through channels that do not talk to each other;
• answers that contradict one another — two equally plausible addresses, an employer who stopped being one before the proceedings even began;
• empty answers, which nothing distinguishes from a request that never went out, unless somebody is keeping the list;
• and a file that, all the while, is running behind a deadline nobody has suspended.

The practice software — Soolus, CDJ 2, Septeo — holds the file, the documents, the accounts. It does not hold the enquiry. The enquiry lives in a mailbox, in a spreadsheet kept on the side, and above all in the memory of whoever is handling it. It goes on holiday when they do.

A file that has stalled has rarely stalled for want of a legal route. It has stalled for want of an answer nobody chased.

What the law forbids doing with it, and why that matters here

The same code sets a hard limit: information obtained may be used only to the extent necessary for enforcing the titles for which it was requested. It may not be passed on to third parties, nor be made the subject of personal data processing. Breaching that rule carries criminal penalties, on top of any disciplinary proceedings.

That limit draws the exact shape of what a tool is allowed to be inside a practice. A record of a search stays attached to its file, serves that file, and never becomes a reusable memory running from one debtor to the next. This is not a precaution we add on: it is the starting condition.

What an agent holds, and what it never touches

An agent holds the list and the calendar of what has been requested, what has come back, and what is missing. It reconciles what comes back with what the file already contained, and it flags what does not line up rather than choosing between two versions.

What it does not do is just as easily stated. It does not assess whether the steps taken are sufficient. It does not draft the document that records them. It decides on no enforcement measure. And it builds no store of anything that would outlive the file.

The profession has finished its reshaping: since July 2026 the title of commissaire de justice has been exclusive of any other. The scope of the job has shifted. The way a piece of information gets found has not shifted an inch — and that is where the time goes.

---

What an agent does inside a practice, with no practice named, is described in our resources. The operational detail is given in conversation.