Short answer: yes, routinely, and sometimes within days. The longer answer is worth reading, because the speed comes from procedure - and part of the procedure you can start yourself today.
The Three Grounds an Attorney Uses
Hardship: the law requires release of levies that prevent meeting basic living expenses - and a wage garnishment leaving you only the modest exempt amount usually qualifies on its face. The attorney builds the package - income against documented essentials - and gets the determination made by phone with documents faxed during the call, the release transmitting directly to your payroll department. Resolution: entering an installment agreement or hardship status supports release, and for qualifying balances the agreement gets established in the same session. Procedure: garnishments require a Final Notice of Intent to Levy and 30 days first, and a garnishment issued without the notice trail, to a stale address, or while an offer or hearing was pending is invalid - defects end levies outright.
What Speed Actually Requires
The compliance toll: releases stall hard against missing returns, so the filing sprint runs simultaneously, built from the IRS's own wage and income transcripts. The package discipline: the hardship file exists before the phone call, because the call is the decision. And the start date: day-two engagements keep more paychecks than day-eighteen ones, every time, because each payday is a deadline.
What You Can Do Today
Confirm your employer received your exempt-amount statement and that it claims your real filing status and dependents - unreturned, the computation defaults to the worst case, and fixing it raises every check immediately, attorney or no attorney. Gather the IRS notices, especially anything titled Final Notice. Then make the call - this is one of the engagements where counsel demonstrably pays for itself in weeks, and the first conversation is free. If the garnishment is taking this Friday's check, today is the day.