Follow-up1A – to People being Sued

February 19, 2019

If you are being sued, you probably don’t have a lot of time to make a decision about whether or how to defend yourself. But you do have enough time to make a careful decision, because making the right decision is important, right from the beginning, when you’re being sued.

Your first question has to be whether to fight the debt collectors – or to let them get an easy judgment. Since you’re reading this, you’ve probably decided to consider fighting. We have addressed the question of whether it makes sense to defend yourself many times. Here is just one sample (if you need it):

I obviously think you have an excellent chance of winning if you defend yourself. Now, of course nothing is guaranteed. When you’re dealing with the law, you are dealing with humans, and they can have prejudices that could affect you. If they follow the rules, you should almost always win. They – the courts and debt collectors – don’t always follow the rules, though, and they don’t always pay attention to you. So one of our main goals is to teach you how to MAKE them pay attention to you and follow the rules.

And then you use those rules to win. We’ll go into that a little more tomorrow, but today I want to remind you that, indeed, this thing works.

Here are a few things some of our members have said – you can find many more by looking at the comments to our videos on youtube, if you want.

Frank in Arizona

“Your materials are simply the best and finest anywhere for pro se defendants facing debt lawsuits.”

Frank was a single dad in Arizona who had developed some trouble paying his bills. The debt collectors harassed him for a while and then filed suit, asking for a large amount of money they said was owed, and attorneys’ fees on top of that, a total of over $15,000.

Naturally, he was very worried that they’d get a judgment and start garnishing his wages – and that the judgment would hang over him like a dark cloud. But he couldn’t afford a lawyer.

He joined us and filed an answer. With our help, he began the discovery process – and of course he encountered a stone wall with everything he did. The debt collectors are happy to file suit, but they’re never going to be reasonable about following the rules. No, they have to object to everything, almost randomly – they made claims of “attorney client privilege,” for example, for negotiations between the non-lawyer debt collector owners and the non-lawyer debt sellers. Lots of stuff like that.

We helped Frank work his way through all that.

Honestly, most debt collectors would have stopped at that – they were losing money as soon as he started fighting – but these guys were stubborn. They filed a motion for summary judgment.

Their motion made all the usual claims – that they could swear to records created by other people, that by negotiating he’d “admitted” owing money, and all the rest. It was scary, but it was BS.

With some guidance, Frank responded to the motion for summary judgment and beat it.

Beating a summary judgment motion just means you still have a trial, but it gives debt defendants a big edge. That’s because of the nature of the “proof” debt collectors always use. They don’t really have anything but records, records someone else made. Beat em at the summary judgment, and those records don’t look any better at trial – you’re going to win. But you still have the fight.

Meanwhile, two other debt collectors filed suit against Frank. He responded by answering the petition and beginning the process of defense. Frank actually laughed when he told me about it – he just wasn’t afraid of them anymore.

These collectors almost immediately dropped their lawsuits. They went away and have never been back.

After that, Frank was ready to move on with his life. He knew he could win, but he didn’t want to do the work to go to trial. He offered the initial debt collector $500 for a full settlement, including a removal of all credit references. They took him up on it, and Frank was ready to get on with his life.

Shirley P, in Detroit

“Yes, yes, yes. You were totally right about ‘strike hard and strike fast’ [our strategy on discovery]. Before court started today the debt plaintiff’s attorney asked me what I wanted, and I said dismissal with prejudice. He completed the papers and I was out of there in ten minutes.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that, “next to death, Americans fear getting sued more than anything.” Holmes was a Supreme Court Justice, and he knew what he was talking about. So what was Shirley, a middle-aged black woman in Detroit, going to think?

She was great. She decided to join us and fight despite her worries.

The debt collectors gave up when they saw what she sent them for discovery, just as easy as that – and after she’d been so scared.

Kelly from Utah

He just said: “I won.”

And what an understatement that was! Kelly was being sued by debt collectors for a large amount of money, and he had to go through the discovery process and fight off a motion for summary judgment. And still, the debt collector insisted on going to trial. By the time that happened, Kelly was thoroughly prepared, and he destroyed their evidence and got the case dismissed with prejudice.

By the time Kelly got to court, he knew the law better than the other side. We’d practiced what might get argued and what to say. He was thoroughly prepared, and he deserved to win, and did.

I don’t want to write a book here, but I’ll tell you a little more about these cases tomorrow. Something that might, but probably won’t, surprise you.

Regards,

Ken

Thank You for Signing Up

February 19, 2019

Thank you for signing up for information from Your Legal Leg Up. As you know, our mission is to give regular people everything they need to beat the debt collectors and protect what they own.

We plan to give you some important information that will help you get or keep things under control and keep as much as you can from the debt collectors. We’ve just sent you an email confirmation link, and you’ll need to confirm your subscription before you get anything else from us.

The debt collection process is one big machine, in a way, but it does matter where you are in the process. According to your answers to the “What is Happening” field, we will send you information tailored to what is actually happening to you now and what you might want to do from there. The options are based on whether you are worried about your debts, being harassed by debt collectors, or actually being sued.

Please confirm your subscription. We look forward to helping you take control of your situation, whatever it might be.

Regards,

Ken

They’re Suing Me for A Lot – Won’t they Fight Harder?

November 28, 2018

For a copy of this article in pdf form, click here: why amount does not matter

Why the Amount the Debt Collector is Suing You For (Almost) Doesn’t Matter

From a normal consumer’s point of view, the threat posed by a suit for $500 or $1,000 is very, very different from one for $25,000 or $50,000. But the difference in amounts to the debt collector is much less significant than you might think. There are several reasons for this, from the way they view risk to something called “opportunity cost.” We’ll discuss both of those things here.

Our observation is that debt collectors do NOT treat cases for large amounts any differently than they treat cases for small amounts. They follow a set of standard procedures.

Sued by a Debt Collector

If you’re being sued by a debt collector on a debt for $500, the lawsuit itself probably scares you in that it’s pulling you into a hostile and alien world – the world of litigation – where you expect people to frown at you a lot and make you pay. And for most people being sued by debt collectors, $500 is not a negligible amount – actually having to pay it could be a significant hardship. On the other hand, a suit for five or ten thousand dollars is a different, and much scarier, thing. You’d get over a $500 judgment, but you might never be able to pay off $10,000.

There’s a tendency to project. Because ten thousand is such a hurtle for you, you think it’s a large amount of money for a debt collector. You might think they’d do a lot more for this larger amount.

For the most part, however, you’d be wrong in thinking that. This is because of the way they assess the various risks associated with collecting debt.

Risk

Debt collectors look at three primary factors in evaluating their cases. These are risk of losing, price of winning, and chance of collecting. To put it all in terms of “risk,” you might put the factors this way: the risk of losing, what you risk in order to win, and the risk of not collecting what you win.

Risk of Losing

Debt collectors regard the risk of losing a debt suit as negligible. Their business model, which involves bringing suit without ever even looking at the evidence that might support their suit, shows how confident they are. They know most lawsuits they file won’t ever be disputed at all, and the price of losing is trivial to them. They’re dealing in the hundreds of millions of dollars of nominal debt – your suit for $25,000 doesn’t even register as a risk worthy of concern.

Of course the lawyers who will eventually be involved in your suit take a somewhat different view. They don’t want to lose because of their pride and reputation, but at the end of the day the amount at stake is trivial to them, too.

Price of Winning

Debt collectors take the price of winning far more seriously. For one thing, the cost of buying the debt and filing suit are “sunk” costs. That is, they paid that up front as a minimal cost of doing business for any law suit. Every time you do anything that requires them to take action, it’s costing them new money, and it’s not the basic cost of doing business in the courts, it’s money you’re making them pay.

They can see that, and they know the money they spend on your case may be going away for good. Thus our materials aim to emphasize and increase this risk, and we are usually quite successful in doing so. Taking action that increases the cost of winning will have a significant impact on the way the debt collector values your case – it lowers the value of the case in the debt collector’s mind dramatically.

Of course if they’re suing you for $50,000, your actions wouldn’t seem likely to reduce the value of the case very much, right?

Wrong, and that brings us to the final risk factor, chance of collection – or you might call it the risk of not collecting (we often refer to it as “collection risk.”

Collection Risk

Have you heard the expression that if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, they own you, but if you owe them a million dollars you own them? This is related to the collection risk factor. Banks know, and collectors know, that collecting $1,000 is usually possible against an unwilling defendant. But collecting ten thousand? Not going to happen. You probably won’t have it, and if you do, you’ll hide it.

That sets up a dynamic: the more you owe, the greater the collection risk discount. If they’re suing you for $25,000, nobody expects to collect anything like that. They might get a little more from you with a $25,000 judgment than a $1,000 judgment, but not enough to matter.

And there is a good possibility in both high and low dollar cases that they won’t be able to collect a cent.

Thus debt collectors do not consider high dollar cases particularly valuable. They don’t like spending money on them any more than on low dollar cases.

Now look at the larger picture of the world in which debt collectors live.

Opportunity Cost

Opportunity cost is the cost of doing one thing rather than another.

Remember that the amount of debt in the U.S. is essentially unlimited. That means the opportunity for suing (other) people is equally unlimited.

Now remember that debt collectors get judgments approximately 80% of the time by default. That means they can file suit in 100 cases and get 80 judgments in about an hour. If those judgments, conservatively speaking, are for $5,000 apiece, that’s $400,000 in an hour. And these numbers are not only theoretically possible, but I have seen them happen many times.

Now consider your case for $50,000. Even if they thought they could get that – which they almost definitely do not – if they have to spend five hours working for it, they’ll lose perhaps two million dollars in default judgments in that time. Does that sound like a wise business decision?

Of Course They Aren’t Machines

You might think the debt collectors are cold-blooded opportunists, and you might think they would only do what makes them the most money. And usually you’d be right, but they are human, and sometimes other factors work their ways into cases. They won’t always do what you might expect.

But the odds are strongly in your favor, and that means that it makes sense to defend yourself as much in big-dollar cases as little dollar cases.

Your Legal Leg Up

Your Legal Leg Up is a website and business dedicated to helping people defend themselves from debt lawsuits without having to hire a lawyer. As you can see below, we have a number of products as well as memberships that should help you wherever you are in the process. In addition to that, our website is a resource for all. Many of the articles and materials are reserved for members, but many are available to everyone.

Finding Resources

Our website is both a business and a public resource, and you can use it to find information on a wide variety of debt law-related topics. While many of our resources are restricted to members, of course, many more are free to the public. Please feel free to use it. Every page has a site search button in both the header and footer. It’s a little magnifying glass icon that looks like this:

Click on the magnifying glass icon, and a small window opens. Put in a key word – a word you think relates to what you’re looking for – and enter. You will get a page of results.

Memberships

We have quite a few products that will help you with specific issues (you can find them by clicking on the “products” button in the top menu of every page on the site), but most people should consider starting with a membership.

Members get discounts on all products as well as unlimited opportunities to join our regularly scheduled teleconferences. This gives invaluable real-time assistance, answers to questions, help with strategies, and encouragement. You also get the Litigation Manual for free with membership. Find out about memberships by clicking the “About Memberships” link in the menu at the top of any page on the site.

Sign Up for Free Information

You can sign up to receive free information from us by clicking on this link and following the instructions: https://yourlegallegup.com/blog/sign-up-for-free-information/

What you’ll receive if you sign up is a series of several videos and articles spread out over several days, and then you will occasionally hear from us as we add information to the site. We don’t always announce that information, though.

Should I Buy Your Motion for Summary Judgment Pack?

November 27, 2018

When Do you Need the Motion for Summary Judgment Pack?

If the other side has filed a motion for summary judgment against you and you want to defend only, you should get the Motion for Summary Judgment Defense Pack.

If the other side has filed a motion for summary judgment against you, and you want to defend and also file a motion for summary judgment against them on the same case, you should get the Motion for Summary Judgment Omni Pack.

And if you either want to file a motion for summary judgment against them (without their having filed one against you) you should get the Motion for Summary Judgment (Offense) Pack.

What is a Motion for Summary Judgment?

A motion for summary judgment is an “evidentiary” motion. That is, unlike a motion to dismiss, a motion for summary judgment seeks to determine a set of facts that are “uncontested” or not in dispute and asks the court to rule on how the law applies to them. What makes a judgment “summary” is that it is decided without a trial. A “motion” is the request to the court to issue the judgment.

Either party can file a motion for summary judgment. If the other side files one first, you put your response to theirs, and your own motion together and call it a “cross-motion.” Thus “cross-motion” really only refers to timing. Substantively, you will either be filing a motion for summary judgment against them, defending against their motion for summary judgment, or both.

Establish “Uncontested” Facts

Because disputes in the evidence are supposed to be resolved at trial, motions for summary judgment are supposed to be determined based only on “uncontested” facts. But “uncontested” and “facts” are terms of art, as you will see in the materials. A fact is not established because you say it is so in the motion. A fact can only be established by evidence properly presented to the court. Likewise, a fact is not “contested” simply because you don’t like it or you say it isn’t so – it’s only contested by the admission of evidence that shows it isn’t so.

Illustration

Let’s make up an example to clarify how these things work. Suppose the debt collector is filing a motion for summary judgment that says you owe $1,000 on an old credit card. They put in an old statement showing you supposedly owe the money and an affidavit by one of their robo-signers that says the statement is “accurate” and that you haven’t paid the bill.

Their Case

That is pretty much exactly what the debt collectors do every time. Their evidence that you owe and haven’t paid is the credit card statement and the affidavit. They’ll say it’s “uncontested,” so what do you do?

Your Defense

You will object to the affidavit and credit card statement for legally powerful reasons (as shown by the summary judgment pack) and you will, if you can, add an affidavit of your own that says, roughly, “I don’t owe them, never owed them, didn’t get a statement, and never had an account with the bank they say this came from.”

Your effective objection SHOULD be enough, because it is up to them to present actual, admissible, evidence in support of their “uncontested facts.” But if you can add an affidavit of your own, the effect is much more powerful. Then you are both attacking their evidence and introducing contradictory evidence of your own.

Warning

Merely claiming in the Response to their Motion that you don’t owe the money would not keep their evidence from being “uncontested.” Understand? You must present evidence and attack the validity of their evidence.

Cross-Motions for Summary Judgment

Now (because of the nature of debt cases), if they can’t win a motion for summary judgment against you, you should almost always be able to win a cross-motion for summary judgment against them. That is, they have the burden of proof on their claim. If they can carry that burden, they will win the case. If they can’t, then they should lose (the whole case) – if you show it and file a cross-motion. Therefore, if they file a motion for summary judgment against you, you will almost always want to get the “Omni” MSJ pack. Filing a cross-motion does involve significantly more work, but if you can do so you might save yourself a lot of trouble later.

Your Motion for Summary Judgment

Suppose they don’t file a motion for summary judgment, but you have gone through discovery and found that the only things they have in support of their claims are an affidavit and the old statement used in the above example? As a matter of fact, that is typical. In that case you should consider filing your own Motion for Summary Judgment.

Motions for summary judgment require significant effort and require you to find out and follow various procedures rigorously.

So they are work.

Why You Should Do It

But if you win, you can cut short the process of the lawsuit and avoid trial. And even if you lose your motion for summary judgment you will be educating the judge to the issues and changing the way the judge and other side look at you. Therefore, we suggest you do it – if you have time after finding out through the discovery process that they don’t have what they need.

At a minimum, working your way through a motion for summary judgment will sharpen you tremendously on the law and facts of the case, and it will very likely result in winning one way or the other. Thus we recommend it if you can do it.

Motions for summary judgment are designed for situations where you can show certain decisive facts.

The Motion for Summary Judgment Pack is NOT…

The MSJ pack is not another way to get what you need to defend the lawsuit. It is material aimed at a specific procedural motion and moment in time. Defending yourself requires a commitment to a process. It could include motions to dismiss, answering the petition, filing a counterclaim, conducting discovery, moving to compel discovery, and various pretrial maneuvers. It rarely requires all of these things, but our Litigation Membership is what you need to prepare for the fight.

We would suggest that you might not ever need the motion for summary judgment pack, but even if you do need that, you will also want the litigation membership. The membership is the glue that holds all the parts of the lawsuit together.

Should I Buy Your Motion to Dismiss Pack?

November 27, 2018

Short Answer: Only if you need to file a motion to dismiss.

Long Answer – As follows:

When Should One Purchase our Motion to Dismiss Pack?

A lot of people buy our Motion to Dismiss Pack on the theory that they want the case against them to go away. It isn’t as simple as that. The motion to dismiss pack is applicable to situations where (1) you have filed a counterclaim and the debt collector moves to dismiss it, or (2) you have some legal basis for arguing that even if everything the petition against you is considered true the debt collector does not have a right to collect from you.

The first of these possibilities – that you are defending against a motion to dismiss – is obvious. If they want to dismiss, you will probably want to defend against that. Your motion to dismiss their claim is more of the question.

Purpose of Motion to Dismiss

A motion to dismiss is a way to “test the adequacy of the petition.” It is NOT a way to test whether the debt collector has evidence to support its lawsuit. Motions to dismiss are therefore appropriate, most generally, when you have a challenge to the company’s right to sue you in a specific court or in general, or when you have a challenge to the court’s power over you. There are also what are known as “equitable” considerations we will discuss.

The Debt Collector’s Right to Sue You

The main way this comes up is in jurisdictions where they have passed regulations on debt collectors which the collector has not followed. Most typically this is an issue of registering or not. Several states require debt collectors to register in some way before pursuing debt – and debt collectors often ignore those regulations. If yours did, a motion to dismiss on that basis would be a good idea.

Another way the right to sue you comes up – much less frequently – is that the petition fails to allege ownership of the debt. This could happen, for example, where ABC Collectors are suing you on a Citibank credit card. If they allege in the petition that they bought the debt, then you will want to find out what evidence they have, but this is part of the suit and not a motion to dismiss. If they fail to allege why you’re supposed to owe them on a debt apparently owing to Citibank, a motion to dismiss is probably in order.

The Court’s Right to Hear the Case

You may want to challenge the court’s power to hear the case against you. This arises in two ways. First, the suit could be brought somewhere other than the jurisdiction in which you live. You live in X county, and they bring suit in Y county and you never lived there. That would likely deprive the court of jurisdiction over you and constitute a violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

The other, more common, reason for this sort of motion to dismiss has to do with service. Were you served correctly? And this question can be rather complicated. For present purposes, we merely say that a motion to dismiss is the appropriate way to challenge the court’s power over you, and this is a motion you would want to file before taking any other action in the suit. If you think you were not served properly, in other words, you will probably want to file a motion to dismiss.

“Equitable” Circumstances

There are certain gray areas that might be appropriate for a motion to dismiss, and these are called “equitable” considerations.

“Equity” is a historical reference to the way courts used to be in England, but for our purposes they refer to something more like moral rightness. If the debt collector waited too long to bring suit, if it did something to prevent you from making payments, or if you settled the case previously and they still sued you might all be examples of equitable defenses. While they DO involve evidence beyond the pleadings (the normal boundary line for motions to dismiss), you could probably bring these things as motions to dismiss. You would also be wise to plead them as “affirmative defenses” in your answer if you file an answer

What Motions to Dismiss are NOT for

You don’t file a motion to dismiss because you aren’t satisfied with attachments to the debt collector’s petition or don’t think they have the proof. Yes, you’ll attack their case – but later, and in another way. You don’t file a motion to dismiss because you just want the case to go away. And you don’t BUY a motion to dismiss pack here as an inexpensive way to defend the case in general. Our motion to dismiss pack is a specific product aimed at a specific situation. If it doesn’t apply to your situation, you will simply want to get the Gold Debt Litigation Membership and start doing the things you need to do to win the case.

They’re Suing me and my Business, Can and Should I Defend?

November 27, 2018

We get this question a lot because people borrowing money for their businesses usually have to offer personal guarantees. Then if the loan goes sour, someone sues the owner and the business.

Suing Your Corporation

This issue does not normally arise where the business is either a sole proprietorship or a partnership, because these entities are not treated as “separate persons” in the law. When you’re sued as a partnership or sole proprietorship, you’re just being sued individually.

If you own a corporation, on the other hand, it is a separate person, and only lawyers can represent other persons. That means you can defend yourself, but not the corporation. What should you do? This depends on what you can afford and what is at stake.

Corporation Valuable

If the corporation has assets and is valuable, you probably need to protect it. That means hiring a lawyer to represent it. If you don’t, the debt collector will get a judgment against it by default, and such a judgment could be or become a major nuisance.

Corporation Not Valuable

If the corporation is not particularly valuable and is not going anywhere, you could consider dissolving it if there’s a judgment, so that is less important. The debt collector may try to prove that the corporation is too “thinly capitalized” and is, therefore, just an “alter ego” for you, however. That is something you should take seriously, and again it would suggest hiring a lawyer – at least for advice on what to do about it.

Proving thin capitalization is much more lawyering than most debt collectors are prepared to do, however. They like to use premade forms to establish cases against people who do not defend themselves. Getting the facts to prove thin capitalization is uneconomic for most debt collectors, although of course this doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen in an individual case. Normally it won’t present much risk.

Hiring a Lawyer

If you hire a lawyer to defend the corporation, it is likely that the lawyer could also represent you personally. If you make that choice, which is wise if you have a lawyer well-versed in collection law, then you will simply be putting your fate in the hands of the lawyer. The problem is that most lawyers are NOT well-versed in debt defense, and there is a new financial variable as well, namely that the lawyer must charge for his or her services and recommend a “reasonable” course of action. That likely will lead to a settlement that might not be in your favor.

The Advantages of Self-Representation

The alternative is to let the lawyer represent the corporation while you represent yourself. This leaves you in the case as an involved litigant. As a practical matter, the case against you and the corporation are pretty much identical, and work on one will be work for both. Not all lawyers would willingly be involved in that scenario, but if yours is, you may get the best of both worlds. That is, you can let the lawyer spend “reasonable” amounts of time defending while you spend “unreasonable” amounts of time defending. Or, rather, since the lawyer is charging you $100 per hour or more, if you can work for less than that, time spent could be reasonable for you while unreasonable for the lawyer.

In debt law, unlike most other types of law, self-representation can make very good sense. You will not have the same bias towards settlement the lawyer has, and you will be free to spend more time on the case. This informs your judgment as to the law yet also makes your defense much tougher. We do believe that the risk of inadequate defense (by lawyers) is significant given the financial constraints, and suggest that your remaining knowledgeably involved could be very important.

Self-representation is annoying and time-consuming, and may not be financially efficient, but it would probably increase your chances of success, and there are intangible benefits of winning that are very significant.

Our Materials

Our materials will be of help to you in defending the legal issues involved in the collection. Our resources on legal research will help you with the other issues as well, but we have not addressed the specific issues of corporate law that could come up if your company is being sued. You will find the teleconferences helpful in many ways.

Do Our Materials Work against Original Creditors

November 26, 2018

Do Your Materials Work for Cases against Original Creditors?

Yes. When I represented clients in these cases, there used to be a more significant difference between original creditors and junk debt buyers. We’ve written a lot about the differences between original creditors and debt buyers. They boil down into two things: you are more likely to have a counterclaim against a “debt collector” (which all debt buyers used to be considered); and debt buyers are less likely to have the documents they need to beat you. These differences are still there, but they are less important now than they used to be.

We will discuss both defense and possible counterclaims.

Defense

The main reason our materials work against both original creditors and others is practical. That is, it is because of the way law is actually practiced and the way people dispose of lawsuits. As we have often pointed out, parties settle cases only because they think a particular settlement offer is the best overall result they can obtain. It has nothing to do with what might be good, or nice, or anything else, for the other side. As a practical matter, you look for what is best for you and don’t try to help the other side, right?

Debt lawyers consider three things in this analysis: the risk of losing, the price of winning, and the chance of collection. These three things are very different.

Risk of Losing

The risk of losing is the chance that you will lose. It’s obviously never quite zero, but the people suing you pretty much ignore this risk – they think they will win, and the few times they don’t, don’t hurt. At the beginning of a lawsuit, therefore, this risk might as well be zero in the minds of the debt collectors. Our materials are designed to help you see whether they have any weaknesses, and if so, to build on them to create doubt in their minds. For pro se defendants, that’s pretty much all you will ever accomplish.

Price of Winning

The price of winning is very different. That is MUCH more of a consideration for the people suing you. Given (they think) that they will win, what will it cost to get the thing to trial and get the judgment? At the beginning of the case, the people suing you also ignore this issue because most people don’t put up much or any fight. The debt collectors expect their judgment easily and quickly – probably by default without any work at all.

And they get it most of the time. Our materials help you change their perception of this factor. Everything you do will cost them money, and the more you have done, the more they expect you to do. In other words, as you defend, the pile of costs grows, and the pile of expected costs grows even more. Whether they are debt buyers or original creditors, this radically changes the equation in their heads. It raises the likelihood that they will lose money whether they win the case or not. Frankly, this is why most of them settle for a reasonable amount.

Chance of Collection

The other factor is the chance of collection: given that they will win, can they get money from you. Debt collectors and original creditors both understand that most people want to pay their bills, and the reason some don’t is that they have money problems. They know they can’t get money from you if you don’t have it, and they think you probably don’t have it.

This factor is very much a part of their thinking at all stages of the case, and it’s why most debt collectors will probably give you a discount on the case before you do anything – if you ask. It won’t be much of a discount, but it will be more if you offer a lump sum (eliminating the risk of collecting the rest) than if you offer payments. Does that make sense?

Factors Work Together

Notice how these factors work together. If you don’t give the other side information about your assets, and you do conduct discovery, you (slightly, in their minds) increase their chances of losing and drastically increase the costs of suit. You also delay the judgment they had expected to get quickly – and that reduces their chances of collection if they win.

The two most important factors, cost and delay, are the same for original creditors and debt collectors. Risk of losing goes up more for debt collectors than original creditors, but this factor is never important for either debt collectors or original creditors.

Thus our materials help you drive the value of the case down in the same way for both groups. If the other side regards your case as less valuable, it is more likely to offer you an actually good settlement, or to walk away from the litigation eventually. But what if it doesn’t? How do our materials work then?

Remember that law is a contest with very specific rules. It has always been our belief that either debt collectors or original creditors COULD win their case against you. To do so, however, they have to get the stuff they need and follow through with it, and these are expensive to do.

When we started Your Legal Leg Up, we knew that debt collectors almost never had what they needed to win if the case went to trial, and we were satisfied that they could not get it in a cost-effective and timely way. But we believed original creditors did have the necessary evidence or could easily get it. We have discovered that this is not true.

We are unaware of any reason why this is so. From our perspective, it would seem to be a simple process to retain the necessary records and do what is necessary to “authenticate” them as evidence (make them admissible in court). Nevertheless it is an observable fact that they often do not obtain or use appropriate evidence, and therefore there must be some reason for it. Perhaps it is the same for original creditors as it is for debt collectors – either they don’t think it’s worth it given the collection risk, or they are set up in a way where getting the information would clog up their systems and increase costs in general. In any event, you can find out if they have the evidence and the will to use them correctly by doing only one thing: fighting their case and conducting discovery. We believe there’s a good chance you will win if you do this.

Counterclaims

The other side of debt defense is using a counterclaim to take control of the lawsuit. We do still regard this as an important thing, if you can do it. That’s because if you can hold the debt collector in the suit with a counterclaim, you can make them dismiss the case “with prejudice,” which prevents anyone else from suing you on the debt. It will also help you repair your credit if you destroy the claim against you.

You will probably never have a good counterclaim against an original creditor, whereas you might get one against a debt collector. Some claims do exist – notably defamation or, for extreme acts, something called the “tort of outrageous infliction of emotional distress,” but the courts have historically been amazingly tolerant of original creditors. Much less so of debt collectors.

But again, as a practical matter, these things have turned out to be less important than they might have been. If you win the suit against another party (without prejudice), they are unlikely ever to sue you again even if they could. And if they sell the debt, the person buying the claim would have little chance against you in court. It also appears to be true that after dropping a suit against you the other side would have less energy and desire to prevent you from credit repair. It isn’t that they like you or couldn’t make trouble, it’s just that they have no financial interest in doing so. This appears to cause a lot of them to take no steps to prevent your efforts to remove their credit references.

Most people being sued by debt collectors just want the suit to go away and are not interested in trying to make the other side pay. This reduces the importance of the other side’s status as debt collector or not.

Conclusion

Therefore all things considered, our materials are about equally effective against debt collectors and original creditors. If the matter goes all the way to trial, you might have a somewhat larger chance of losing to an original creditor, but fighting intelligently will give you your best chance of preventing that from happening. The actual court processes are the same in either case, so you will be prepared to fight.