Case Mgt Conference

Your lack of resources is not a defense. Many people show up to court to explain why they can't pay some alleged debt. This often happens at default judgments and summary judgments. While the judge may be sympathetic as a human being, she really does need to hear actual defenses.

In your court, you appear to have a meeting before any of this where there is an effort to narrow issues and perhaps find a settlement. You can certainly try to tell them that you aren't worth bothering with but since they've gone this far and getting a judgment when the defendant puts up no defenses isn't difficult in most courts today, you might not have much luck.

You may wish to at least investigate what sorts of defenses you possibly might have. For example, while you may owe someone money, is it the people who are suing you? What evidence do they have that you owe them money? If it is some form of assignment, does it show your particular account is assigned to them and the entire chain of title to that particular account back to the original creditor? If you are your own lawyer, in the adversarial system that we have, it's pretty much up to you to raise all this and do it correctly.

 

A judgment has nothing to do with how much money you have. Even if you have no money at all, you could get a judgment saying you owed a billion dollars.

Of course you aren't going to get one for a billion dollars, but it sounds like it will be substantial enough. And it will probably have some sort of interest rate attached to it. This means over time it will grow even larger.

Once they get the judgment, then they will try various means to try to extract whatever that amount is from you. They might attach your wages. They might go into your bank accounts. They might drag you back to court to discuss what money/assets/income you have. Even though you might have nothing that they can take, this is all unpleasant.

So a judgment is a bad thing to be avoided even if you are "judgment proof".

It might be impossible to avoid a judgment. You might have no choice. Of course, it is possible that you might have some defenses. It is also not unfair on your part to insist that the people who claim you owe them money really do in fact own whatever debt they allege is yours.

 

As Dumb Bob (who isn't really so dumb) said, you need to come up with defenses. Make them prove they own the debt. Make them show chain of custody back to the original creditor.

While you might not have anything now, judgments can be good for 20 years or more and in many states can be renewed. So if you ever get anything, they can take it. Depending on the state, they may be able to have personal items sold at auction. Just because you think you don't have anything doesn't mean the court will think that.

So attack the validity of the debt, if nothing else. Don't go down without a fight.

 

I assume you would have to show up for the case management conference.

As to what a lawyer can do for you, well, first of all he won't go in assuming you're doomed. He'll attack the chain of custody and see if they can REALLY prove this debt and show the paperwork coming from the original creditor through all of the hands it's passed through.

 

See if you can find one who will take your case. Many will give a free inital consultation, then you'll have an idea how much they charge.

You can go to naca.net (make sure it's .net) and see if you can find an attorney in your area through the board.

 

Case Mgt Conferences are not for the purpose of discussing the case. They are held so that the court can determine whether the parties are ready to go to trial or not so that the court can docket the case for trial. You miight have to wait only a few minutes for your case to be called and it might not get called for two or three hours but you must be there. Of course the plaintiff is always ready to go to trial and the defendants are seldom if ever ready to go to trial. Obviously you are not ready for trial but that won't matter to them or the court.

Then you don't have much to worry about. They can't garnish your pension and can't even threaten to do so.

You don't need any lawyer either. That would just be a waste of money. I just added the second link to my new links page. It leads to another Google Docs page that will give you a pretty good idea of how you need to go about putting up a viable defense. The link to my links page is in my signature line below.

Oh good grief, no, don't even think of doing that. The time for that will come when they go for garnishmentf If you are not in the garnishment phase then you want to resist any and all attempts to gain any kind of personal or financial information. If you are asked for personal or financial information your comeback should be to ask them what bearing that information has on the outcome of the case. Of course, the answer is NONE. If they ask you what you do for a living that same response apples. If the judge should compel you to answer then say that you are only responding under duress and coercion. Of course, you don't do anything for a living so tell them that. If they ask whether you are retired just tell them you are just tired. (LOL).

Of course. They don't want to have to earn their money. They just want you to get all frightened and just up and give it to themvoluntarily. But you live on a pension and they can't touch that.

Just be sure that no other money is ever put into your pension account because if you deposit other money in that account they can grab all of it.

 

Bankruptcy? Why on earth would you want to do that? They can't get a crying dime out of you no matter what they do. If they try to take your pension money just file a federal case on them and sit back and watch them run for the tall timber. (LOL)