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Stop RISKING your lien rights and putting yourself through the construction preliminary notice paperwork nightmare! Hire a service company that will PERFECT and PROTECT your MECHANIC'S LIEN and BOND CLAIM RIGHTS. Read here about what to look for when checking out a preliminary notice service. Be sure to subscribe to our free newsletter as it will keep you updated on happenings at our site, updates to our forms and ongoing news in the construction world.

Consider hiring a company that researches, perfects and protects your mechanic's lien rights for you. What's neat about these companies is they already have in place the resources needed to verify the information you provide and if they find something incorrect, they correct it.

If you don't have the time to devote to researching construction trust deeds and such (verification processes are very time consuming and expensive), then using a service company to protect your lien and bond claim rights may be just the ticket for you. Normally, it's set up so that you pay a fee for their service plus all postage expenses. Because the agency is focused on filing preliminary notices as their business, they can usually do it at a much lower cost than you can.

What about mistakes?

Ask your potential provider what happens if they make a mistake, be it in their research, or a typo, or not tracking receipt of the notices, or whatever mistake they make. If your service company makes a mistake and doesn't prelim the correct entities, and then the job runs into problems and you don't get paid, and you can't file a lien because the preliminary notice was processed incorrectly by your service provider, will your service provider make good on their mistake(s)! (meaning: will they pay you what you lost due to their mistakes?)

After looking around at the different companies and their services, we decided on Levy - Von Beck & Associates, P.S. I realized just how much I'd been risking when they explained the differences between my processing the paperwork myself vs. them protecting my lien and bond claim rights.

The first time I used Levy - Von Beck & Associates, I had a huge shock. I sent the job info to them, including contact information for the two parties that needed to be "prelim'd" on the project. Imagine my surprise when Levy & Associates came back with FIVE different financially involved entites on the project! All five of these entities had to be prelim'd, and if they had not been, we could have ended up in trouble. (In California, a subcontractor can face disciplinary action for not serving a preliminary notice!!) Without the services of Levy - Von Beck & Associates, we very well may have found ourselves in trouble with the law (not to mention we'd have lost our lien rights)!

When looking into preliminary notice service providers, make sure you look hard at these points:

* What does it cost to process a preliminary notice?

* Is the fee per notice (ie: 5 entities incurs 5 times the price) or per project (lump sum no matter how many entities)?

* How are the postage fees handled?

With Levy Law, I pay $31, plus actual postage, to have them research & process the notice (no matter how many entities need to receive a copy). When I do it myself, it takes me a minimum of two hours to process the notice. At $20 per hour, that comes out to a minimum of $40 to do the notice myself, and that doesn't include the time needed to do the research that is so critical to accurately processing your prelims.

A plus with using a prelim agency is that you may have access to a free consultation with an attorney (if the agency has this benefit available), should you run into problems on the job, such as non-payment.

To contact Levy - Von Beck & Associates, P.S. for more information:

(206) 626-5444 voice
(800) 368-1736 fax
email to: tlevy@levy-law.com

Regular mail to:
Levy - Von Beck & Associates, P.S.
One Union Square
600 University Street Suite #3300
Seattle, WA 98101
Click here to view and print their business e*card!

There are several ways to process your preliminary notices, only you can decide which works best for you. For those times that you choose to process the preliminary notice yourself, the next page (5) consists of an outline of how we handled our preliminary notices before we found Levy & Associates.

(Please note that we do NOT recommend that you manage the prelim notices yourself. We DO recommend that you hire a reputable service company.)

Thank you for visiting our site. I hope that this series of articles is helpful to you! I'm always happy to receive feedback, so please do send me a note if you have anything you'd like to tell me. Thank you!! :)

Diane