First off, I want to say hello to everyone on this forum. I've been lurking for the past couple of months in order to get some info on how to deal with a bottom feeder CA. Five months ago, my ex-wife received a summons for a lawsuit in regard to an old Capital One card she had. She asked for my help and after looking over info here, we went to the court house and registered her intent to defend a week later. The last transaction that took place on this card was Nov, 2002, so it's well outside the SOL for Georgia and that was going to be the defense. I probably should have pressed on with that but didn't at the time because it appeared that the CA was basically going to drop it. Well this week she received another large piece of mail from the CA with the following items in it: Request for Admission of Facts Request for Production of Documents and Notice to Produce to Defendant Plaintiff's First Interrogatories to Defendant All 3 have the usual paragraphs that have been talked about in other threads. I didn't want to crowd this posting too much with them, but if anyone needs them listed I'll be glad to do that in another posting. What I was interested in finding out was if the best course of action in this would be to just basically answer each request and all the paragraphs in them with the simple statement: Paragraph #: Denied cause the alleged debt is time-barred by the Statue of Limitations for the state of Georgia. Then at the end of each document, I would include the necessary info as to TILA and the fact that credit card are considered open accounts and not written contracts and so on Again, I'm trying not to overburden you with too much info, but anything else you may need, I'll be happy to put in another post. Thanks for all the help already received from reading other posts in the forum and for the future help.
It appeared that way because they didn't do anything for a while? How long did it take them to sue in the first place? Don't assume that things are over until they are really over. Admissions are intended to reduce the number of issues so that the trial or summary judgment doesn't take as long as it otherwise would. If you deny things that are later proved, you can have costs to prove those facts you denied added to the judgment. This isn't really intended for the ultimate question of the case, however, just as a means to reduce issues to get to that ultimate issue. You should read books in your state about discovery and admissions. Some rules are certainly state specific. Dumb Bob thinks you might consider returning your answers to all of this with your demands for similar materials from them. What you want to know is what they have. Especially you want to know how it is they think they own some alleged debt. But given your SOL argument, when the last time they have proof there was a payment and what that supposed proof is. All they may have is some mysterious person claiming that a payment was made within the SOL. What if it turns out that the court thinks that it is a written contract? Does that answer the questions they are asking? Debt collecting lawyers will often object to admissions and the other things, claiming that they actually don't have to answer because of this or that reason. Or they will even not answer the question that was asked. What this does is force the other side to often try to work something out before then attempting to compel production. Discovery isn't really something that the court probably finds enjoyable because there are sometimes so many fights that go on. How do you know that they are considered something other than written contracts? If you have not gotten advice from a lawyer in your state, Dumb Bob wouldn't risk waltzing in with only that argument.
I can't give legal advice but I can tell you that if you sued them, they would have no less than 10 affirmative defenses in their answer, maybe even as many as 20. If you just have one and they rebut it with something like DB suggests, you just lost your one and only hope. If you don't talk to a lawyer, at least do some homework and see how others have handled similar situations.
