Judgment - lawyer tactic

[catwhisperer]

Cat, this can work to your advantage. They will only be represented by there briefs....all you will have to do is provide proof that there brief is not accurate to the specifics of your account and get the judgement thrown out. Will you have access to there briefs before hand? I don't know.

The amount is very small (6K to them anyway), and your correct in that they are spending more money fighting it than they can hope to recover. That is probably why they are not spending the money to send a lawyer to the court house.

I suspect you may be right! From what I've read here, the collector with the biggest threat wins and they are using scare tactics. I'll bet they think we won't show up so if they file briefs but we don't show up, they win. But if they file briefs, don't show up and we do, it could get tossed out. We're going to take that route for now, it's all we can do.

[no_it_all]

BankNorth N.A (Plaintiff) sent a Summons and Complaint to yours truly (Defendant). P claims that D is deficient to the tune of 9K+ for a repo'd truck. 9K represents the difference between what truck sold for at auction and what D owed (orginal note was around 36k). D was served at work by local sheriff.

I noted that the Summons and Complaint did not have a docket number. After rooting around the Laws of Civil Procedure it became clear that the Summons and Complaint were not filed (and no filing fee paid) by P. Common practice and this is why:

If D does not Answer or make Motion within 20 days, P beats it down to the courthouse and pays the filing fee. D then gets hit with a Default Judgement.

In this case I did Answer the Complaint and raised three Affirmative Defenses. Those defenses are critical because in Civil Law if they are not raised before of during the Answer, they can never be raised.

The Defenses related to Insufficiency of Process, Insufficiency of Service and lastly, Jurisdiction. Defendant then requested that Court dismiss in entirety the Plaintiff's claim and enter judgment in the Defendant's favor.

There are a couple of interesting points here: First is that the Plaintiff is/was on a fishing mission. Meaning that if I ignored the Summons for twenty days, they could then pay the fee and get a judgement. By answering and raising defenses, they no longer have a slam-dunk case and have to decide if they want to play the game. If you do not have a docket number on your Summons the court isn't aware of the pending suit.

If your case hasn't gone to judgement yet, you may want to try some of these tactics...good luck.

[catwhisperer]

snipped: The Defenses related to Insufficiency of Process, Insufficiency of Service and lastly, Jurisdiction. Defendant then requested that Court dismiss in entirety the Plaintiff's claim and enter judgment in the Defendant's favor.

If your case hasn't gone to judgement yet, you may want to try some of these tactics...good luck.

What was the Jurisdiction argument? We bought the trailer while in Delaware and now live in PA

[no_it_all]

Argument?? We haven't gotten that far yet! But since I was a resident of one state and was Summoned in another state I thought I would claim an Affirmative Defense for jurisdiction...Again, these are defenses that cannot be claimed later in the case...I thought it would be best to try the shot-gun approach and blast out all kinds of Defenses....we shall see how they work out.....The actual wording went something like this:

FIRST AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSE
To the extent that the court lacks jurisdiction over the defendant it should be dismissed.

Nothing too explicit, just something for the Plaintiff to think about and raise a challenge to...