A Harris County jury never heard this case. State District Judge Dawn Rogers decided it, entering judgment in June for $61.5 million, the full balance a commercial lender claimed across multiple loan documents dating to 2018.
Kyle Poelker led the trial team at Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Mensing, with Todd Mensing as co-lead and Justin Kenney rounding out the group. Their client had waited years to sue.
“Our client gave the debtor time to repay but finally had to file suit and is happy to finally get this fair ending,” Poelker said.
Judge Rogers awarded the full principal, declarations confirming the lender’s security interests, and $277,000 in attorneys’ fees. None of that follows automatically from filing a lawsuit over a defaulted loan. Read closely, the result maps five specific points in a lender’s file where the same claim can fail before a default ever reaches a courtroom.
1. Treating patience as costless
Forbearance is the commercially sensible move more often than not. A lender that gives a struggling borrower time frequently recovers more than one that forecloses immediately. That same patience hands the borrower a waiver argument: the lender did not enforce its rights when it could have, so it gave those rights up.
That defense did not work here. Judge Rogers awarded the full balance across every loan document at issue, the outcome Mensing and Poelker’s trial team secured for their client. What separates a lender who survives a waiver argument from one who does not is largely paperwork completed before the forbearance period, not during the lawsuit. A forbearance agreement that makes the borrower waive existing claims and defenses closes off exactly the argument that sank the informal version of this problem for other lenders. One legal explainer of these agreements puts the mechanism plainly: language requiring the borrower to release “all claims, defenses, and set-offs to the debt” means that “anything that the bank did which was improper or illegal, up to that point, cannot be used by the borrower to defend.”
2. Extending relief without dating it
A waiver defense needs a record to work against. Verbal assurances, informal payment plans and undocumented extensions leave a lender exposed to a borrower’s account of what was promised, because there is no competing account in writing. Reservation-of-rights letters and signed, dated forbearance agreements with a stated expiration close that gap. A trial team can defeat a waiver defense cleanly against a paper record. Against a record of undocumented indulgence, the same defense becomes a genuine fight rather than a formality.
3. Skipping the perfection check before litigating the debt
A money judgment proves a debt exists. Whether the lender can actually collect on it is a separate question, governed by Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, and it turns on the priority of the lender’s security interest rather than on the size of the number a court enters.
Perfecting a security interest, most commonly by filing a UCC financing statement, is what gives a lender’s claim priority over other creditors reaching for the same collateral. Among perfected creditors, priority generally runs first in time, first in right, based on filing date. A lender holding an unperfected or lapsed filing, UCC-1 statements expire after five years without a continuation filing, can win a judgment and still stand behind better-positioned creditors when a borrower’s assets are actually distributed.
Judge Rogers issued declarations confirming this lender’s security interests alongside the damages award. Mensing’s trial team pled for that relief alongside the principal rather than treating it as an afterthought, and it is the piece of the judgment that actually makes the dollar figure collectible. Litigating the debt without confirming the collateral position produces a number that may never convert to cash.
4. Leaving fee recovery on the table
Texas allows attorneys’ fees only where a contract or a statute provides for them. The $277,000 awarded here traces to language written into the loan documents in 2018, not to the size of the recovery eight years later.
Lenders sometimes treat a fee-shifting clause as boilerplate that will take care of itself. A lender that wins its principal and cannot recover the cost of getting there has effectively spent part of the judgment on the judgment, and in a smaller matter the arithmetic can make enforcement not worth pursuing. Confirming that the clause exists, and that it reaches appellate work as well as trial work, belongs on the same origination checklist as the collateral review.
5. Asking only for money
A damages claim and a declaratory judgment claim on the underlying security interest are two different requests, and a lender that pleads only the first leaves the second on the table. Mensing’s team asked for both from the outset, and Judge Rogers granted both: the $61.5 million balance and separate declarations establishing the lender’s security interests in the collateral.
That second piece of relief is what turns a judgment into an enforceable position rather than a number a debtor can contest again in a later proceeding. A lender that wins on the debt but never asks a court to confirm its security interest has left itself arguing the same collateral question in whatever forum comes next, against a debtor who has already lost once and has an incentive to relitigate anything left open.
What the format of the trial says
Loan enforcement cases often land at a bench trial, as this one did, and the format tends to suit the subject matter. Contract interpretation and secured transactions are questions judges decide routinely and a borrower’s account of hard times may move a jury more than it moves a judge working from the promissory notes.
That changes what winning requires. Every provision in the case has to connect to a specific piece of relief requested, and equitable defenses get tested against the loan file rather than against sympathy for the borrower. A lawyer running a jury-style narrative in front of a judge holding the promissory notes may lose the room, because the questions a judge is actually resolving are closer to legal and accounting than to storytelling.
Mensing has built a practice on exactly this kind of documents-heavy dispute. Board certified in Civil Trial Law and with more than 60 trials to his name, he has spent two decades arguing cases decided by which contract provision was triggered rather than by which witness a jury liked best.
The decision that has to precede the trial
None of the five items above matters if a lender will not credibly threaten to try the case. A borrower who senses a lender is bluffing negotiates harder, settles for less, or does not settle at all. A lender who can point to a trial team like the one Mensing co-led changes that calculation before a complaint is ever filed.
Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Mensing, the firm that carries Mensing’s name, lists commercial lending and bankruptcy litigation among its practice areas and reports having at least one matter in active trial in nearly every month since 2016. For a lender weighing counsel on a loan file that has gone bad, that cadence is a data point in itself, separate from any single result. It answers the question a borrower’s counsel is quietly asking too: will this actually go to trial, or is the filing the whole play?
The five items above are not sequential steps so much as a single discipline applied at different stages of the same file. Waiver exposure gets managed at the moment of forbearance, years before any complaint is drafted. Perfection gets managed at origination. Fee-shifting language gets negotiated into the note itself. By the time a lender is choosing trial counsel, most of what determines whether a judgment converts to cash has already been decided by documents signed long before the default.
