This is a follow up to a post I made yesterday about Capital One suing me for an old car loan. These papers say I have 20 days to respond to the court if I don't want a judgement against me. I plan to respond but I am not certain how to respond. It is my loan, the amount seems very high but regardless, I just cant pay it. Do I explain that in my response? Do I explain to the court/capital one my financial situation? Will responding prolong a judgement? (which I know is coming) This paper gives no court date.....it's just telling me to respond within 20 days to the court and send a copy of my response to the plantiff/attorney. Also, I found the case on my Countys court site. Where it lists a judges name, next to it it says "Arbitration 01" and then lists a persons last name. Is that a good thing? Thanks for all your help. I just cant afford an attorney right now. It says I may have to pay the necessary filing fees to response and I am not even sure I can afford that!
If you file an answer more than likely it will be set for trial in front of the Judge. You've got 20 days from the date you were served to file the answer. Just because you say you cant pay it doesn't mean you don't owe it, and regardless if you can pay it or not, they can still get a judgment against you, to proceed with garnishments if allowed.
affidavits? Were there any affidavits included with the complaint? If so who was the affiant and who was the notary? If there was an affidavit was there an actual notary stamp visible? What state was the notary from? Georgia?
There are no affidavits included with the summons and no notary stamp on this summons. It is not from Georgia. The only thing attached to the summons are copies of my original car loan contract as well as any correspondence Capital One sent to me. I am just real confused when they say I have 20 days to respond. What am I suppose to say.....it's my loan?
Maybe Howard Lee Schiff & Assoc is getting a little bit smarter after having been hit with so many lawsuits and losing them for using false and misleading affidavits. So how to respond to the summons? Well, I can't give you any legal advice because I'm not an attorney but if I were in your shoes I think I'd want to use a graduated denial as my response. I'd most likely want to send them a list of demands for admissions and see what comes back from that. Once I had their responses to that I could then hope to use their responses to formulate my demands for production of documents and maybe interrogatories as well. Seems like leading off with interrogatories is a waste of time and interrogatories because they always deny or find some way to evade answering the questions. Maybe I'd start off by demanding that they admit that they have no proof of their claim which of course they will most likely deny. That would open the door to a demand that they produce their proof. There are other ways to do the same thing which many might suggest would be better but you need to start somewhere. Maybe I'd demand that they admit that they have no competent fact witness with first hand knowledge of the debt and they may very well deny that too. Fine! Then demand that they name their witness and who is the employer of that witness as well as what his testimony is expected to be. I'd probably demand that they provide statements from Cap1 which are certified to be true and correct copies of the originals. Certified by the person who did the copying stating who their employer is and that the copies are exact copies of the originals. Those are just some things I might demand but in order to do it right I would have to see a copy of the complaint. Without that I can't tell what I really would demand. Doing it one step at a time instead of sending out your interrogatories, demand for production of documents and admissions all at one time will stretch out the discovery process quite a bit, of course. In the meantime they will probably send you all of theirs in one shot which you will have to figure out how best to answer them without giving them any more answers than is absolutely necessary. That's not real easy and you will have to use your state and local rules of procedure to even hope to do it correctly. Then if this was their first contact I'd also want to send them a demand for validation. I'd want to send it certified mail, return receipt requested and also fax it to them with a cover sheet and get a printed proof of delivery just in case they ever claimed they didn't get it.
