Stop a Lawsuit (Summons)
When you stop making payments on your credit cards or other debts, your creditors will first attempt to resolve the debt informally. They will call you incessantly, or have a debt collector make repeated telephone calls to you, both day and night. The phone calls from debt collectors can get quite abusive to the point that they constitute unlawful collection tactics. When the harassing phone calls don't result in payment of your debt, your creditor will have an attorney file a lawsuit against you. If you have received a Summons, that means that your creditor has filed a lawsuit against you and you have been "served" with the lawsuit. You have a short amount of time to respond to a summons and stop a lawsuit. Otherwise, your creditor will obtain a judgment against you and then collect its judgment through a bank levy on your bank account or a wage garnishment of your income that you receive from your job. To stop a lawsuit, you can hire an attorney to fight the case (and every other law suit that is filed against you down the road), or you can file a bankruptcy to eliminate the underlying debt.
Stop a Lawsuit in San Diego with the Help of a Bankruptcy Attorney
If you plan on hiring an attorney to fight a lawsuit, it can be very expensive. Most lawyers will require a hefty retainer and will bill their services out at an hourly rate in order to defend a lawsuit. Unless you have a good defense, you will lose the law suit, and fighting the case will only delay the inevitable. Other creditors will sue you, and you will have to defend those law suits as well. If you don't defend, or if you defend and lose your creditor will obtain a judgment against you and go after your bank accounts and your wages by doing a bank levy or a wage garnishment. A bankruptcy attorney can help you stop a lawsuit by filing a bankruptcy for you. Filing a bankruptcy will stop a lawsuit and eliminate the underlying debt upon which the lawsuit is based, effectively eliminating the law suit completely.
Why Your Creditor Must (and Will) Sue You
Your creditor has only a certain amount of time to sue you or else it will forfeit its right to sue you. It is called a Statute of Limitations. Once the statute of limitations runs, your creditor can no longer sue you. It used to be that creditor attorneys would wait until just before the statute of limitations ended to file a lawsuit against you. In San Diego, credit card lenders are becoming more proactive and procrastinating less. It is becoming more common that shortly into the collection process and well before the statute of limitations expires, creditors' attorneys in San Diego are suing customers on credit card debts. Also becoming more and more common in San Diego County is that HOAs are filing lawsuits to collect HOA dues after homeowners have walked away from their home or condo.
How to Respond to Lawsuit
Once your creditor files a lawsuit against you, there is short period of time in which you must respond to the lawsuit. You must respond to a credit card lawsuit, an HOA lawsuit, and most other types of lawsuits, within 30 days. If you don’t respond, your creditor will win the lawsuit automatically by what is called a judgment by default and then proceed to collect the judgment by garnishing (taking) your wages by way of a wage garnishment or taking the money out of your bank account through a bank levy. If you respond, you have to pay a substantial court filing fee to answer, and you will need to hire a lawyer to defend the case. Chances are that if the law suit is a standard collection action seeking to collect credit card debt, you will lose because you made the credit card charges and you owe the money. In such a case, defending the lawsuit just costs you money and only delays the inevitable entry of a judgment against you.
Filing Bankruptcy to Stop a Lawsuit
Filing bankruptcy will put an end to most types of lawsuits. As a general rule (there are exceptions), bankruptcy will:
• Stop a lawsuit for unpaid credit cards.
• Stop a lawsuit for unpaid medical bills.
• Stop a lawsuit to collect a line of credit debt after a foreclosure.
• Stop a lawsuit seeking to collect HOA fees.
• Stop a lawsuit to collect a car loan debt after a repossession.
Defending a Lawsuit Can Be Expensive
Defending a lawsuit can be very expensive. In San Diego, you can expect to pay an attorney $30,000 to $50,000 if the lawsuit goes to trial. In most cases, your money would be spent more wisely on hiring an attorney to file a bankruptcy for you. You can expect to spend far less on hiring a lawyer to file a bankruptcy than you would on paying a lawyer to defend a lawsuit. What is more, bankruptcy will eliminate the judgment debt whereas defending the lawsuit will simply delay the entry of judgment against you and you will likely still have to file bankruptcy to obtain debt relief.
Bankruptcy Flat Fee
In contrast to defending a lawsuit, which can be very expensive (paying an attorney by the hour), a bankruptcy is relatively much less costly of a remedy. Bankruptcy is handled on a flat fee basis, meaning you pay a flat fee for completing the entire bankruptcy. Typically, the flat fee for a bankruptcy will be less than initial retainer deposit for the defense of a lawsuit. And with bankruptcy, you eliminate all of your debts, whereas with defending a lawsuit you deal with only one debt and you may lose the lawsuit and have to pay the debt anyway.
Consultation
If you have been sued with a Summons for a lawsuit, you need to talk to a lawyer, and fast. Contact Bankruptcy Legal Center today to schedule your free consultation with a San Diego bankruptcy attorney and discuss your options for how to stop a lawsuit. We'll help you prevent a judgment from being entered against you, so you can avoid a bank levy and wage garnishment. Call us today at 1 (800) 44-DEBTS (1-800-443-3287).
