Collector doubt?

If you accept a payment arrangement you will reset the statute of limitations in most states.

She basically told you they have nothing. Go for Discovery, then Motion to Dismiss.

 

To get a judgment against you. Dumb Bob suspects she's brighter than she's letting on.

This would create some sort of account stated which means that they would then argue you owe them the money because you agreed you owe them by paying, obviating the need to bother with actually proving things like that they own a valid debt that is really yours. The SOL would also likely restart although that depends on state law.

She doesn't really want to go to court? Of course she doesn't want to go to court if you are going to roll over for free. The whole reason for collection agencies and what they do before you go to court is to get you to pay by avoiding going to court.

If you are being sued, you should be in contact with the other side. You should appear so that you get all documents that are being sent to the court. You should serve your documents to the court and to the other side. There are rules for all this. You should find those rules for your court and follow them.

 

What is it that you want to know about discovery? It is a simple process and there are basically 4 different discovery tools. One is known as interrogatories, another is known as admissions, another is demand for production of documents and the last is known as deposition.

Interrogatories are a written list of questions a recipient must respond to. If the respondent fails or refuses to answer each question the sender can file a motion to have those deemed admitted and if that is granted the questioner will have won his case easily. The respondent must answer within a certain number of days which vary from court to court and are determined by the rules of procedure in each state. Questions should address only one issue at a time and usually cannot be mulitpart questions. In most states, multipart questions are to be considered as individual questions and count towards the total number of questions allowable. In many jurisdictions if the total number allowed is say 35 or 25 or whatever and multipart questions are asked and the total exceeds the allowable number then the respondent can pick and choose which questions s/he will answer. Again, rules of procedure control all of this. Allowable types of questions and allowable answers are also usually included in the rules of procedure. Be sure you know your rules of procedure. That should be about all you need to know about interrogatories.

Admissions are different to some extent. You can't ask questions in admissions. Each must specifically start with ADMIT OR DENY this or that and neither admissions nor interrogatories can ask questions or demand admissions of a legal nature. For instance, you can't demand to know whether or not they violated any FDCPA laws. You can't demand anything that calls for a legal conclusion of any kind because only a judge can make those kinds of conclusions and determinations. Again, in some jurisdictions you may only use a certain number of demands for admissions and Rules of civil procedure will tell you what you can and cannot do. Demand for production of documents is also covered in your rules of procedure.

Depositions is something you don't even want to know about unless you are called in for a deposition hearing. They get nasty real quick. If you are called in to an attorney's office for deposition you should never agree to that. You want to demand that any depositions be held on neutral territory such as one of the conference rooms at a local library. Pick a location close to their offices, rent the room yourself and hire a court reporter to be there. Let that be a surprise they find out about the hard way when they get there. They may or may not show up with their own court reporter but if they don't and you have one there they are not likely to be happy campers. You do have the right to have a court reporter there and in most courts it is required to have a court reporter at all depositions but often attorneys will ignore that or have one of their staff there to act like a court reporter. You need to be sure that the reporter is an actual court reporter and not just some flunky of theirs. There is much, much more to discovery. Volumes of books are available at the public library or at Barnes & Noble or most book stores.

Dismiss isn't going to teach you that. Dismiss is a motion before the court to dismiss the case and it usually don't work. I tend to think that motion for summary judgment is much better but you have to know how and when to use it or your motion will be quickly denied.

Yes, but you have to use it in a certain way to make it effective. Just denial of all their allegations isn't going to get you anywhere because you also have to prove why your denials are valid if you don't do it the right way. If you do it the right way your denials become your response to the summons and complaint and is used in lieu of an affirmative answer. In other words, I think a denial is a much better response than an answer is. If you read your summons it will often times tell you that you must respond to the summons and complaint but does not say you have to answer it. There is a huge difference. If you do your denial correctly judges will almost universally accept them as a response or answer despite the plaintiff's objections to them. It is all a matter of how it is worded and how it is prepared and filed with the court. I went to court with a friend a couple of years ago and he had filed a denial in lieu of an answer. The plaintiff's attorney demanded a default judgment because, according to her the defendant had not filed an answer to her summons and complaint. The judge overruled her objections and said that the defendant had properly responded to the complaint so she couldn't have a default judgment. She immediately went ballistic. As a result she had not come to court prepared to present her case. She just knew she had it won by default. She tried to wing it and that failed miserably as well. She ticked the judge off so bad her case got dismissed with prejudice.
But there is so much more that anyone should know and do in order to present a reasonably good defense. I wouldn't even attempt to teach it all here because it can take volumes to do that. I have much more such instruction in my links page which you can access by clicking on the links in my signature line. Hope I have been able to help you a little bit at least.

 

I'll be glad to help you with those discovery requests for free. No problem. All you have to do is get a gmail account if you don't have one then go sign up for Google Docs and do a copy and paste of all their questions, one document at a time or scan them and upload them as a picture. Once you have the questions all uploaded set your permissions to share with editing rights and send me the link to it in a PM and I'll go look them over and put in the responses I think you should use. I'll also need to know what state you live in so I can look up the state rules of procedure to see what is and is not allowable as a response. Once I have given you what I think are the best answers you can simply copy the whole thing and paste it into a word document and you are good to go. Then you can delete the google doc to maintain privacy. It will never show up on the web because Google don't let their docs actually get out on the web. All Google Docs have a special code embedded into them so spiders know not to index the pages. There is a special way to circumvent that and get the docs out on the web and spidered but very few people know how to do that.

 

You are being sued. The lawyers may be nice but you are being sued. If you pay any money, you likely will reset the statute of limitations and create something like an account stated.. Is the alleged debt within your state's statute of limitations? If not, this is an affirmative defense but you usually must plead it.

They may wait to get enough people in your county to make it worth it.

Dumb Bob doesn't see these two opinions in this thread. Ignoring lawsuits is usually not the best path. Not having any money is not a defense so the fact of your assets will be entirely irrelevant to the judgment.

You do want to calm down, but you also want to at least appear properly so that you know what is going on. If you ignore the lawsuit, you won't even know when they file for the default judgment. The summons and complaint should say on them what you are supposed to do and how much time you have to do it. Even if it is over that time, as long as they haven't yet gotten a default on you, you can still try to file.

Dumb Bob recommends that you start going to your court and watching what happens at these hearings. This will quickly make it clear what is going on and how most people either don't show up or don't know what to do.

 

Dumbbob isn't so dumb and I can quickly see that you aren't either. Count on the fact that the Plaintiff's lawyer isn't dumb and neither is the judge. In fact, there just aren't all that many dumb people any where in this day and age. But that doesn't mean they can't be accused of doing dumb things or being ignorant about some things. All of us do dumb things from time to time and all of us are also ignorant about many things. That's no big deal so don't feel bad about having asked what could you possibly do that would affect the outcome of the trial. I'm glad you asked.

We all know that you owe the money. All of us know that we have rights but what most people don't know is that if you aren't willing to defend those rights you really don't have any except those which the other fellow is willing to grant you in net effect..

How about the right to be told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in a court of law or in any other dealing with creditors and debt collectors? The right to due process of law? The right to be free of harassment? Are those important rights or not? They are to me and if they are to you then the questions must become what is it they have told me that might be false and misleading, how are they failing or refusing to provide you with due process of law and how is it that they are unduly harassing you and what you can do about it if they are doing those or other illegal things to you.

In order to figure out what they have done or haven't done that the law requires them to do is far beyond what I can tell you here in this forum. I'd have to talk to you personally and I'd have to look at all the documents and letters they have ever sent you in order to figure that out and doing that simply isn't possible in this forum or any other that I know of. Even if I or someone else could do that you would still have to know how to put the information to good practical use.

Having sufficient knowledge about your rights and how to defend them doesn't alter the fact that you do owe the money and no matter how good you are there is probably little or nothing you can do to alter the outcome of the trial. The chances are very slim that you could come out of this trial free of the debt. But that isn't the end of the matter. You have to answer those questions and maybe have to end up producing all your private information such as your income tax records, bank statements, drivers license information, all information pertaining to any and all assets you may have and maybe more. If you don't they can end up putting you in jail until you do deliver the information they want. If you answer those questions incorrectly and give them more information than you need to by law then you may very well have to produce that documentation and more. All I am offering to do is help you answer those questions in such a way that you can keep from having to produce much if any information at all
If you had sent the same documentation to the plaintiff their attorney would avoid answering any of your questions in any meaningful way. If the plaintiff's lawyer can and would do that then why can't you do the same? You have the same rights the lawyer does.

But the greater question is have they provided you or the court with any false and misleading information? If so you can use that to sue them for their illegal acts just as they have the right to sue you for your failings. If they have done illegal things to you in the process of trying to force you to pay and you sue them for those violations the outcome can become a wash or maybe even end up with them paying you to go away and leave them alone.

So while you may not be able to change the outcome of this trial doesn't need to mean you lose in the end. But let's not worry about all of that. Right now all you have to worry about is answering those questions and I'm willing to take the few minutes to help you without any charge or obligation whatever. You don't even need to know who I am. Don't make any difference who I am or what I do. And no, I'm not a lawyer. I don't work for any lawyers either. I don't work for anybody now and I haven't for at least the last 20 years or more. I just happen to have the knowledge that I have. So if you want the help I offer then let's get it done. If you want to just answer the questions and suffer the consequences whatever they may be then that's OK too. The final outcome is probably all up to you. So if you want help just say so.

 

Go here https://sites.google.com/site/cap1sucks which is the last link in my signature line and read all of the left hand side bar and you will be able to figure it out.