A free consultation is not a casual call. It is a diagnostic session with a limited clock, and how much you get out of it depends almost entirely on what you bring to it. Attorneys who handle MCA matters regularly can compress significant analysis into thirty minutes, but only if the information in front of them is organized.
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What follows is not a bureaucratic checklist. Each item below corresponds to a specific legal question the attorney needs to answer within the first hour of your engagement.
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All MCA Agreements in Their Original Form
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This seems obvious, and yet attorneys frequently spend the first portion of a consultation waiting for a client to email documents they could not locate. Bring every MCA agreement you have signed, including any addenda, amendments, or renewal terms. If you took additional advances on an existing agreement or refinanced one MCA to pay off another, bring all versions.
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The specific language in your agreement determines which defenses are available. Reconciliation provisions, default definitions, confession of judgment clauses, arbitration agreements, choice of law and venue terms: these are not interchangeable across funders or across time. An attorney who cannot read the actual language cannot tell you what it means for your case.
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Three to Six Months of Bank Statements
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The bank statements serve two purposes. The first is to establish the actual remittance history, which your attorney will compare against what the agreement required in order to identify whether the funder has been collecting correctly under the reconciliation provision. The second is to give the attorney a picture of your actual business revenue during the period the MCA was active.
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If revenue declined significantly during the term, that decline is the factual foundation for a reconciliation argument. Without the bank records, the argument is theoretical. With them, it becomes quantifiable.
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The gap between what was collected and what should have been collected is sometimes modest and sometimes enormous. One of those outcomes generates leverage. The bank statements are what reveal which.
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Any Demand Letters, Notices, or Legal Correspondence Received
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Bring everything the funder or their attorneys have sent you, including emails. The demand letter establishes the claimed default date and the amounts the funder is asserting. If notice has been sent to your bank or payment processor directing them to redirect funds, that notice is legally significant and the attorney needs to see its exact language.
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If there is an active lawsuit or arbitration proceeding, bring the complaint or the demand for arbitration and any deadlines you have already received. The attorney needs to know immediately if there is a response deadline approaching, because some of those deadlines are jurisdictionally short and cannot be extended.
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Your Business’s Current Financial Picture
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Prepare a brief summary of your current monthly revenue, your fixed monthly obligations, and what is left after those obligations are paid. This does not need to be audited or formal. A one-page summary is sufficient. The attorney uses this to evaluate what settlement structures are realistic and what payment arrangements your business could actually service.
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There is no benefit to presenting a more optimistic picture than the accurate one. An attorney who negotiates a settlement your business cannot sustain has not helped you. The financial summary should reflect your actual circumstances, including whether you have already missed payroll, whether you have other creditors also pressing you, and whether the business is still operating or in the process of winding down.
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A Chronology of Events
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Write down the key dates in the sequence they occurred. When did you sign the agreement? When did payments begin? When did you first miss or reduce a payment? When did the funder first contact you about default? When did demand letters arrive, and what did each one say?
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This sequence matters because certain defenses depend on timing. The question of whether the funder performed a reconciliation before declaring default, for instance, requires knowing when default was declared relative to when your revenue declined. A written chronology prevents the consultation from being consumed by reconstructing a timeline that you could have assembled in advance.
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A Clear Statement of What You Need
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The last thing to prepare is the least tangible but perhaps the most important. Before you call, decide what outcome you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to keep the business operating while reducing the daily drain? Are you trying to negotiate a lump-sum settlement to close the obligation entirely? Are you trying to respond to an imminent lawsuit? Are you trying to understand whether the agreement is enforceable before deciding how to proceed?
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These are different problems with different solutions and different timelines. An attorney who understands your objective from the beginning of the conversation can direct the diagnostic accordingly, rather than spending time on a path that does not connect to what you actually need. The consultation is where this conversation begins.
