Merchant Cash Advance Lawyer: 6 Things to Bring to the First Meeting

The owner who arrives with a story and no paper has hired a lawyer to listen. The owner who arrives with the right six documents has hired one to work, and the first hour of the meeting is spent testing what the funder can prove rather than reconstructing what the owner remembers.

Each item below is on the list because a merchant cash advance lawyer will ask a particular legal question of it. Knowing the question tells you which version of the document to bring.

1. The Agreement Means Every Page the Funder Will Rely On

Bring the executed agreement with every schedule, addendum, fee appendix, and renewal, and bring them as signed, not as the broker summarized them. The lawyer is reading for three clauses in particular, because New York courts read for the same three. In LG Funding v. United Senior Properties, the Second Department listed them: a reconciliation provision, a finite term, and recourse if the merchant declares bankruptcy.

The wording of the reconciliation clause is where the argument begins. The LG agreement let the funder adjust payments "at [its] sole discretion," and the merchant's usury defense survived. The agreement in Bridge Funding Cap v. SimonExpress Pizza required adjustment on request with proof of revenue, and the Fourth Department in 2025 held it a purchase of receivables as a matter of law. Two clauses with the same label and opposite outcomes. The lawyer cannot tell which one you signed from your recollection of the sales call.

Renewals deserve their own attention, since a later agreement may pay off an earlier one, carry its own clauses, and become the document the funder actually sues on (an owner who assumes the renewal merely extended the original has usually never read the renewal). If there were several funders, bring every agreement, in order of signing.

2. The Guaranty Is a Separate Contract With Its Own Reach

Most owners remember signing a personal guaranty. Fewer can say what it guaranteed. The guarantors in LG signed "a personal guaranty of performance of all the representations, warranties, and covenants" of the business, and in Bridge the court treated the guaranty claim as "dependent on the success of the breach of contract cause of action."

Bring the guaranty as a standalone document, along with any spousal consent or second guarantor's signature page. Whether it guarantees performance, payment, or something narrower decides who can be sued and when.

3. Bank Statements Show Whether the Debits Tracked Anything

An advance priced as a share of future receipts should, in principle, rise and fall with receipts. The statements are where that principle is either visible or absent. Bring every statement for every account the funder debited, from the month before funding to the present, and mark the debits.

What the lawyer looks for is a pattern: the same debit on the day the account received a large deposit and on the day it received nothing, the debit that continued through a closure, the debits that kept arriving after the balance should have been paid. In February 2026 the First Department, reviewing the Attorney General's case against Richmond Capital Group, found that daily payments "were fixed and did not represent a good faith estimate of receivables," which is the kind of finding that begins, in any case, with someone reading bank statements line by line. That court's ruling concerned those respondents on that record. It tells you what to look for, not what you will find, and a statement that shows payments rising and falling with deposits is evidence too, though evidence of a different kind.

Bring the statements in the bank's own format. Screenshots of a banking app lose the dates.

4. Every Request, Every Reply, and the Dates on Both

A reconciliation clause is a promise to adjust. A request is what makes the promise do anything. Bring each written request for reconciliation, the revenue records you attached, and whatever came back, including silence, which is best documented by the date you sent the request and the date you stopped waiting.

Bring the rest of the correspondence as well: emails, texts, portal messages, voicemails you saved, and a short log of calls with dates and names. The log does not need to be elegant. It needs to be contemporaneous, or as close as memory now allows.

These records serve both directions of the case. They show what the funder was told and when, and they show what you said, which may include admissions you would rather not have made. The lawyer needs both.

5. UCC Filings, With the Filing Dates Visible

Order a UCC search report on the business and print every financing statement it returns, with the filing date and the collateral description showing. Signing a security agreement can itself authorize the funder to file, so the question is usually scope and timing, not whether a filing was permitted at all.

If the advance was paid off, bring the payoff letter. Under New York UCC 9-513, a secured party generally must send or file a termination within twenty days of a signed demand when the statutory conditions are met.

6. Court and Enforcement Papers, With the Envelope

This item is last on the list and first on the table. If anything has arrived from a court, a sheriff, a marshal, or a bank, hand it over before the meeting begins, and bring the envelope, the delivery slip, and a note of who received it and how.

The manner of delivery is not a detail. Under CPLR 320(a) the time to appear runs twenty days after personal service, or thirty days where one of the other listed methods was used, so the lawyer needs to know which occurred. A confession of judgment should come with its affidavit, because CPLR 3218(b) confines filing to the defendant's county of residence, and treats a company as resident wherever it keeps a place of business. A restraining notice served on your bank tells the lawyer which judgment is being enforced. An information subpoena arrives with a shorter fuse than most owners expect: answers under oath, returned within seven days of receipt.

Bring the papers even if you believe they were served improperly. That belief is a defense only if it survives the lawyer's reading of the affidavit of service.

One more document belongs here, though it has no seal on it: the date you intend to make your next payment, if any.

What the Folder Does Before the Meeting

Delancey Street gives no legal advice and is not a law firm, yet the same folder is what its no-cost, confidential first review works from, and a matter that turns legal goes to separately licensed attorneys with whom the company coordinates. An owner who has been served, or who holds a confessed judgment, should put the folder in front of a lawyer first. An owner who has not, and who wants to know whether a negotiated resolution is realistic, can have the same papers read for that purpose. Either way the documents are the same, and they are the part of the file that nobody but the owner can assemble.