Summary Judgment Hearing

Local court judges never care about FDCPA violations no matter how egregious they may be or how often they violated. The reason is that the only question before the court is whether you owe the debt. Nothing else matters. You absolutely have to take them to federal court and sue them there. You might have lost in local court but you can still win in federal court and make them ask you what it is going to take to make you go away. When you get to federal court the only question before the court is whether or not they broke the law. They can holler about the fact that you owe them money and they have a judgment against you will get them the same response from the federal court that you got in local court when you complained about their violations. The judge will tell them s/he don't care about money or judgments. So let them find out how it feels when the shoe is on the other foot.

I realize that federal court is very difficult for those who don't know the rules or how to prepare all the paperwork but if you will tell me what city you live in I might be able to help you find competent legal assistance that won't charge you an arm and a leg to help you prepare the paperwork. The nice part about it is that you will probably never see the inside of a federal courtroom. It is all done over the internet and by phone or sometimes emails. Once they realize that they can't possibly win they will soon enough want to know how much it is going to cost them to make you go away and leave them alone. That is when you start dictating the terms.

The first thing you demand is that they vacate that judgment in lower court and make that go away. Then, of course you will want your filing fee which is $350 in most courts and you want at least a grand per violation plus your attorney fees. They might argue about it a bit but they will have no choice. It is either that or spend a lot more than that to go to trial. Common sense should tell you that they aren't going to pay their attorney a lot more than that to defend a case they can't win. Their own attorney will tell them to settle and get it over with. Their attorney won't want to lose at trial either.

 

OK, so you are in WA. What city? I don't want to have to hunt all over the state to find you somebody if I can help it.

 

I'll check and see what I can find in Seattle for you and get back to you.

I stayed up late to see if I could help you and did some checking on craigslist.org in the Seattle section and in the Seattle-Tacoma sections. I checked listings in both the financial and legal sections and I did find something there I think you might be interested in. I use craigslist.org to find things all over the country and especially in my home town. Computer parts such as hard drives, monitors or whatever I might need at the moment. They also have listings of local events and group meetings where you can find lots of interesting things to do. Craigslist.org has just about anything you could want and lots of good professional people and companies advertise there. Of course, any place on the net that has such a massive amount of advertising going on always has more than it's fair share of spammers and outright scam artists advertising as well but craigslist spots those pretty fast and delete's their postings as soon as they are exposed. So you do have to be careful but if it is a spammer or a scam they don't stay there long. They have millions of people on line all the time and they don't want to lose that traffic because of spam and scam.

 

If you didn't file a response and a counterclaim, then the judge was correct in ignoring their violations.

You should have filed. Or filed a separate lawsuit in Federal for their violations.

 

You must file an objection to their demand for summary judgment if it is a new motion. If you don't file an objection to it you are a dead duck.

 

How can the judge not care about violations? That is absurd.

 

The judge doesn't care about violations for the very simple reason that the issue at bar is whether or not the defendant owes the money.

 

That may be true - BUT on the other hand the judge could be a creditor friendly judge all the way around - for example a stockholder in one of those banks or a relative in a high position.
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if these judges get bankrolled by banks to issue rulings in their favor.
The Illinois Governor wanted to sell Obama's Senate seat.

 

Almost nothing should surprise us anymore. Judges can be and many times are just as corrupt or more so than other politicians. I know of one case where IRS caught a judge with 8 million dollars hid up in his attic he got by selling his decisions to the banks for years. I know of a federal judge who was a hopeless drunk. There are most likely more of that kind than we could ever imagine.

He wasn't the only one involved in that scandal either. My PIPING HOT NEWS rss feed carries a story about Jessie Jackson Jr. and others being involved in that mess. Piping hot news also carries stories about the auto makers bailout which looks like it is about to fail in the senate, news about new car models and more. You should see the one about the new dashboard they are coming out with for the Mercedes. Another article tells about how Sweden gave Ford and GM a 3.4 Billion dollar bail out for their foreign built cars.

I'm working on a feed for foreign financial news sources. That will be a very important one to keep up with because in the highly likely event that the U.S. government goes belly up for the 5th time in our history they will be carrying the news a week or so ahead of time. Our news sources will be dead silent about it. We will go to bed one Friday night and wake up to find the banks all closed down over the weekend while the currency was being replaced with notes worth about half or less than they were before. That's the way they do it. They don't want people to find out about it before it happens because if we found out about it we could jerk our cash out of the bank and go buy gold or some foreign currency then when the change occurred sell back into the new currency. Doing that would make those who did it at least twice as rich as they were before the devaluation.

 

Something is missing here. Did the judge actually rule on your motion and return his ruling in the form of a written denial or did he just ignore your motion as though it didn't exist or what? Answers to those questions would be material as to whether or not that attorney was right in telling you that you can't sue twice.

 

Are the "magic words" in this case: dismissed without prejudice?

IIRC: if the judge ruled on the counterclaim, he could dismiss it without prejudice and you could refile it. If he dismissed with prejudice then that's the end of it. (dismissal: Definition, Synonyms from Answers.com).

It would seem to me that if the judge did not dismiss your counterclaim with prejudice, you can refile the suit in federal court.

 

That or sometimes local court judges will not rule on it one way or the other but simply ignore the counterclaim completely and rule for the plaintiff. I've seen that happen a few times as well.

 

This is where appeals are appealing.

 

Would you be so kind as to explain the process of appealing a judge's decision to an appellate court?

That ought to be interesting to many here.

Especially to any visiting attorneys or judges.

 

Rules of Civil Procedure apply to filing of appeals. They tell the how of the process. But there is usually a time frame after which an appeal is precluded. (2wk, 21 days, i.e.)

You would appeal the dismissal of the counterclaims as a matter of law, unless the judge specified a specific reason for dismissal. If there was a dissmissal for cause, than that reasoning must raise to the level of being a failure as a matter of law to survive on appeal.

 

What judicial error was made when the judge dismissed the counterclaim?