We have been a General Contractor for 30 years. Most of our work is insurance work that comes from Water Mitigation / Fire Loss. We walk away from $200,000 to $400,000 a year do to PO's keeping the money or Insurance companies playing their games. We recently started using LevelSet with the hopes that filing Mechanics Liens will help get us paid. Now that we are starting to file the liens the next step is to enforce the lien or foreclose on the lien. Hope I am painting the correct picture here. Question are 1. Can we take these to court or do we have to have an attorney do this? 2. What is the average fee an attorney would charge to enforcing a lien? (hope I am using the correct terms here) 3. If we use an attorney is there a way of adding his costs to the balance owed on the lien? 4. If we can not add the costs to lien how do we shift the attorneys fees to the Property owner? (they are the ones that have created the problem by keeping the insurance money and or refused to pay us for the work we did) 5. 80% of our work is in Orange County do you have any recommendations for an attorney that will work with us in matters like this? What we do not want is to spend $200,000 to collect $200,000 what a waist that would be. 6. Would attorneys take work on contingency in this type of situation?