Help Finding a Lawyer

Perhaps the best way is to simply accept that you will run into many lawyers who will not actually provide you with much help. If you can deal with that, you can than contact many attorneys, hopefully finding at least one who is actually serious about your case. Don't despair, you can do this.

 

I tend to think that is probably quite true[/quote]...to that point I would like some suggestions for finding a great lawyer in my area for a consultation of my case(s) dealing with creditors/collectors, and possibly an incorrect Judgment against me. Also I'm hoping this attorney can help me back on the right track to repair my credit and settle any bad outstanding ones as well. Thanks for your time and feedback..[/quote]I seriously doubt that you will be able to find an attorney willing to help you with repairing your credit. If one did and was not properly licensed as a Credit Repair Organization they would be in violation of CROA, Even if they did help you with credit repair they could not ask you for any money until 6 months after the work had been performed or they would also be in violation of CROA. Although I can't remember the name at the moment, I've seen an attorney here in this forum advertising his services as a credit repair expert. He also does a thing called Authorized users that is somehow supposed to drastically improve your credit ratings. Trying to get just any attorney not properly licensed and set up to do those things would not be a good idea.

One of the first things you need to do before seeking legal counsel is go to the courthouse and pull your public record then ask to see the files on any judgments or lawsuits you might have against you. Get copies of all the paperwork in the file(s) so you are ready to talk to an attorney if you find one.

Once you have an attorney in mind you should check his/her public record in the same way you check your own. Look to see what kinds of cases s/he has handled during the past year or so and what happened in those cases. How many of them are similar to your case and problems and what the outcome of those cases was. Did your prospective attorney win his/her cases or lose them? It is highly unlikely that any attorney will have won all the cases he participated in but you would certainly not want to hire one that had no experience with situations like yours or has a poor record of winning cases.

If you are lucky enough to live in a state or county that has all of it's court records on line like we do here in Oklahoma that will make your search much easier and much less time consuming. Just because an attorney talks a great line and claims to be able to help you is meaningless. It is their public record of winning or losing cases that counts. They can't change the facts on record. A great sales pitch might claim one thing but the public record might tell an entirely different story.

Hiring an attorney without knowing what his public record has to say about him is not a wise thing to do. Finding an attorney is easy, especially in larger cities. Finding an attorney competent and willing to work for you is an entirely different matter. There public record will reveal the truth about how experienced they are and how competent they are.

I wish you the best of luck finding a competent attorney. You are probably going to need it.

 

I don't know about CA courts or how they are set up for doing searches but here in Oklahoma we have what is called oscn.net which stands for Oklahoma Supreme Court Network. Oklahoma happens to have one of the most advanced online systems in the nation. So suppose I want to look up an attorney I can put that attorney's name in the search box and come up with every case he has been involved with anywhere within the 13 Oklahoma counties that are in the main data base. All the rest of our 78 counties are in a secondary data base and it is much more difficult to look things up in the secondary data base but it can be done. So suppose I want to look up an attorney by the name of Darryl Roberts. Mr. Roberts spent 12 years as a member of the Oklahoma State legislature before he got nailed by the sunset law which sets term limits for legislators. So Mr. Roberts is a pretty well known man in Oklahoma.

All I have to do is put his name in the data base and I come up with his total record and anyone else who happens to have the same name. Here is the record of Darryl Roberts so you can see how it is done in Oklahoma. tinyurl~com/yek9war

As you can plainly see the record indicates whether the attorney was a defendant or a plaintiff or represented someone else. It gives each case number and you can click on that court record and see what the outcome of the case was. Who won, who lost and all about it.

The only other such data base that I know of that even comes close is the PACER system which is the data base for all federal cases of any type. It is a bit more difficult to use and costs money whereas the OSCN network is free and open to the public. You can check on anyone else the same way including me. If you do you will find that I have had 3 cases filed against me. Two of those were a mortgage foreclosure cases. I managed to make a deal with the bank on the first case and they dismissed so I kept the property for a while. When I fell behind again I lost the case and the property and all of that happened before I learned how to effectively fight mortgage foreclosures or any other type of case.

The second case was by HSBC on a credit card and I won that one. The lawyer very quickly decided he didn't like what the outcome was obviously going to be and dismissed before he got himself into more hot water than he wanted to deal with since the debt was well beyond the 5 year statute of limitations. That could easily have resulted in my filing a federal case against him for FDCPA violation.

There was another case that I also lost but that one don't show up on my record because of a technical error by the plaintiff. Even though he got a judgment he couldn't do a thing with it due to the technicality. I was also sued for a million and 40 thousand in the Western District of Texas federal court (El Paso). I won that case hands down. No problem. It was a piece of cake.

I expect that I'll be getting sued again very soon and maybe multiple times before its all over. If I do I will go into it with the expectation that I will lose in local court. Winning isn't going to be easy unless they make a mistake which I have every expectation and hope that they will. I know the law firm and I know the plaintiff (of course) and I just happen to know of something that the plaintiff uses almost constantly that is highly illegal. If they attempt to use it against me then I just might be able to beat the local case and then its off to federal court we go.

I could have taken the lawyer in the HSBC case to federal but just didn't feel vindictive enough to want to go through the time and trouble involved. I could have also sued the plaintiff(s) in the El Paso case to federal court but they were just ordinary people and I probably would have ended up with nothing for my time and trouble I just didn't think it was worth it in either case but I'm not going to be so easy to get along with if I get another lawsuit as I am almost positive will happen shortly.

But back on topic. I don't know about CA courts and their online resources. Should be even better than Oklahoma's system but maybe it is and maybe it isn't. I'd like to know one way or the other and if they have an online system such as ours I'd like to know about it.

I do know quite a bit about how the CA courts work. They have what is known as a simplified court system. It is simplified for the plaintiffs but not for the defendants. You have to get a special form from the court which you must fill out and return to the court. It is full of nice neat little boxes well designed to make it easy for defendants to admit their guilt and get the process over and done with quickly. What defendants are not told is that they can also expand their responses and turn it into a full blown defense starting with their response, demand for admissions, production of documents and interrogatories. They can take it much, much further than that as well, but of course nobody is going to let them in on the fact that they can do all those things. They have to learn it the hard way just like I have had to do.

I certainly wish you the best of luck. Obviously I'm not an attorney so I can't give you legal advice but if I can give you some food for thought from time to time I will gladly do so. Just ask.

 

There are several different aspects that must be discussed here and I don't want this thing to become so long that the diverse chains of thought get lost here so I'll take things one at a time in the interests of brevity.

So was this the initial contact with you by this particular debt collector???? If so I will want to see exactly what the letter said word for word without revealing any personal information about yourself. If you feel uncomfortable doing that send me a PM and I'll invite you to post it in my more or less private forum. (Don't worry, the moderators know all about it.)

Personally speaking, if I were you I'd be a little hesitant about posting too much detail right out in public forum myself but you do as you please about that.

The reason I want to know everything in the letter both front and back is that I want to look for possible FDCPA violations. From what you have stated here looks like there may be multiple violatins contained therein.

 

You have a real problem here in the first place. In order to get anywhere with this you will most likely have to file motion to vacate void judgment. Judges hate those because they may reveal judicial errors on the part of the judge, even wrong doing. Secondly they are not normally inclined to reverse their own judgments because that is tantamount to admitting they goofed up so they have a rule known as a Rule 12(b)(6) motion in just about all courts which basically says that if a defendant wishes to challenge the decision of the court they must bring forth new evidence which if had been known at the time of trial would have changed the outcome of the trial.

One can and often should consider motions to dismiss under Rules 59 and 60. Just depends on the situation and what conditions exist.

If you wish to claim you were never served you will probably need pretty conclusive evidence that you could not have been served at the time or place claimed in the return of service of summons or that you either never lived there or did not live there at the time service was asserted to have been perfected. In order to accomplish that you could have to prove not only where you did live at the time they allegedly served you but who did live there at that time. That could involve some petty intensive investigations. In the process you might have to ask several people to provide you with sworn affidavits stating that they lived at that specific address at that specific time and date. That might get a bit sticky because those people may have actually been served either by mail or by a throw down type of service and they did nothing about it because they were not the targets of the summons.

I have a student from Nebraska that I'm currently helping who is learning the hard way how those things work. He and his wife are separated. She now lives here in Oklahoma up near the Kansas border. He was served for a credit card debt on a card account opened in her name which he didn't even know about. She had her own business. He accepted the service not knowing that it was for her and so he notified her and attempted to notify the court that he had been wrongly served and he isn't having much luck getting anybody to pay any attention to him. I've spoken to his wife a couple of times before and it looks like I'm going to have to really get involved with both of them to get the service quashed if he can't. She will probably have to file motion to dismiss for lack of geographical jurisdiction and return to Nebraska at least once in order to get it dismissed. In the process she will have to prove where she does live and then they will go after her here in Oklahoma.

I had another student from Kentucky who lived in Kentucky at the time he was served but later moved to California. He tried to get the case moved to California but couldn't because he lived in Kentucky and was properly served in Kentucky. He had to pay it off since it would have cost much more to return to Kentucky to fight than it cost to pay it off.

Another student in New York got served by a process server and he only found out about it when his wife went to the grocery store and there was no money in the bank to pay for the groceries. He started investigating and found out through court records that the process server had served 200 people the same day some of whom lived as much as 400 miles apart on a day when it had snowed almost two feet of snow. Even with that level of proof he couldn't get it vacated so he filed a federal case against the attorney and won in federal court. That all happened about 2 or 3 years ago and then just last year the NY attorney general came down on debt collectors, attorneys and process servers for doing just that type of thing as well as other dirty tricks pulled on consumers. Twelve debt collection employees were jailed and hundreds of judgments were overturned. So trying to get a judgment vacated can be a difficult thing to do indeed.

I have a close personal friend of mine who has built a big reputation as Mr. Void Judgment. He and I have a common friend who has a web site called voidjudgments~com and I asked Jeff one day how many judgments he had actually ever been successful at getting vacated and he replied with "maybe two or three." Richard has been known as Mr. Void Judgment for many years now and freely admits that he needs to do a lot more work in that area. That is putting it mildly to say the least. (LOL). Getting judgments vacated is an extremely difficult thing to accomplish indeed.

 

An excellent set of reasons to sue in federal court.

I think you have an excellent set of reasons to file a lawsuit in federal court and maybe against multiple parties. Maybe you shouldn't even try to fight it in local court because doing so is going to get extremely burdensome and time consuming and the best you can hope for is getting the judgment vacated and at a pretty steep price. Try to hire an attorney will cost you thousands of dollars and may end up being nothing but a lost cause. If we can find causes of action then you would most likely be far better off filing in federal court and get paid handsomely for doing it. Fighting in local courts is usually necessary even though defendants lose almost every time. In my opinion the only way most defendants can win is to turn the tables on them and file federal cases against the attorneys and debt collectors. It just isn't all that hard to do. You just have to learn how and each type of thing you do has a different learning curve. An example of that is that I filed for divorce yesterday. I did it pro se but I paid another person to teach me how to do it. I'm glad I did because I would have goofed it up badly even with all the experience I have. The lady I hired prepared the paperwork and went to the courthouse with me and actually worked me through the process step by step. Without her guidance I would never have done it right.

My wife and I have been separated for about 8 years now so there are no minor children involved and there is no property to split up so filing Pro Se is permissible. Really very simple but if I had just tried to do it without help I would have goofed it up horribly.

An attorney would have cost me about $800 or more but the lady I hired did it for a fraction of that. She was worth every penny of what she charged. In the process I learned all the tricks so I could do it for others here in Oklahoma but I seriously doubt that I will unless it were for someone I knew personally and I doubt that will ever come to pass.

 

Another aspect to this situation

Another aspect to this situation that you really need to pay attention to and do something about and that is the garnishment. They can freeze your bank account(s) even if you are joint with someone else. suppose you are saving money for your kids for whatever purpose. You are only managing their money and you don't consider it to be your money at all but those kinds of accounts are fair game for garnishment as well as those in which you are the sole signatory. If you are joint with your spouse the money can be seized If your spouse has a separate account which you have no access to they can subpoena your spouse and your spouse's bank records to ascertain whether or not you are hiding money in your spouses account and if so they can be forced to cough up the money to pay off the garnishment. So you need to get off of all accounts and if the two of you have been mixing funds then get all the money out of those accounts immediately and close them as well.

They can garnish wages as well so if you work for someone else for wages or salary that can be garnished up to 25% in most states. North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas do not allow wage garnishment at all except for debts related to taxes, child support, federally-guaranteed student loans, and court-ordered fines or restitution for a crime the debtor committed. Florida does not allow garnishment of the wages of the head of a household and some other states allow garnishment of less than the 25% allowable under federal law.

Each state is different and you need to check your state law to find out what is garnishment and what is protected from seizure or garnishment. I find that lawdog~com is the most reliable source of quick information about the garnishment laws in each state. Many posters recommend other sites as being great sources of information about such things but careful investigation will almost certainly turn up false and misleading information because they don't update as state laws change which they often do. Lawdog seems to keep their information updated and I've never found any false or misleading information on their site.

Other things can be grabbed too, such as vehicles that are free and clear, trailers, mobile homes, boats, tools, and almost anything of value that can be sold for money to satisfy the judgment. What can or cannot be grabbed again depends on state laws.

 

You will need to respond to their demands for information or you can be cited for contempt of court and hauled into jail until you do respond and provide the demanded documentation.

You need to be extremely careful how you respond to those questions and take all the time you can legally take to respond to them. If you would like some help responding to those demands in the least damaging way possible I'll be glad to help you with them. The way to do that is through the use of Google Docs. Cap1sucks showed us how to do that and keep everybody's private information safe from prying eyes. He would also be fully capable of teaching you how to respond to those demands and he is a bit more familiar with google docs than I am. If you would rather use Cap1sucks to get through those questions then I'd suggest that you send him a PM and ask him if he will help you or not. If he happens to be too busy then I can do it too.

 

I really can't answer your questions or be of much i fany help until I can see the documents in the case. I'll help you with the subpoena if I can but I'll have to see what it demands.

If you will open up a Google Docs page and type in the document then give me permission to view and edit it I'll see what I might be able to suggest. You can control who sees it and it will not be published to the web unless you specifically request it and even then I don't think it will ever get into the search engines unless you take some special steps to get it there. I think you have to have a gmail account to be able to use Google Docs so you may have to set up a gmail account in order to use Google Docs. That's getting tougher to do these last few days because now you have to have a cell phone to get a gmail account. I guess they are getting tired of people setting up a number of gmail accounts and using them as throwaway emails.

Of course that isn't going to stop people from doing that because you can go to Wal-mart and get a prepaid cellphone for $14 and use it to set up your gmail account, use up the minutes and just don't fund it anymore.

However you do it get a google docs account going, type in the documents you want me to look at and send me a PM with the url in it so I can get a look at it and work with you on it. I don't have a docs account under billbauer but I do under my company name.

Doing things this way keeps your private information safe and I don't ever have to know who your are and nobody else can find out either.

 

It seems that you have a major problem here. From what I see they are demanding production of business records. If this is a business debt then it falls under UCC, not consumer law. So if this is in fact a business debt then you are in for a much rougher time of it than you would be if it were not a consumer debt.

There may be some ways around it. So there are some things I'm going to have to know.
1. Is this actually a business debt or not?

2. If it is a business debt is/was the business incorporated?
3. If it is/was a corporate debt did you give your personal guarantee to obtain credit?
4. Was this a credit card debt or a contractual debt for some piece of equipment or store fixtures or what?
5. How was the money actually used? Was it all used for business purposes or was it mostly used for purchases of consumer related stuff?

These are all important things I must know before I can give you any answers. If the debt is actually a business debt and not consumer related then there isn't much I can tell you because what I know deals only with consumer debt and not business related debt.