I often say that the trick to beating the debt collectors is “defending intelligently.” You have to know a few things and do a few things right. If you do, you’ll probably win.
So what, exactly, do I mean by defending intelligently? What do you have to do?
It’s simple. You have to find out what they have in the way of evidence and weigh their chances of proving their case. If it’s the rare situation where they have what they need, then you will probably want to think about settling the case – you’ll be able to do it for much less if you’ve done some work defending it. But most of the time you’ll find weaknesses in their case. Then your job is to push the case to some sort of resolution where they either drop the case or you win.
It is simple, and taken in small enough steps, it isn’t all that hard, either.
Remember, this isn’t much like most legal work, where the lawyers tend to be quite smart and to work very hard on every case. This really is more like factory work. They’ll get their 99, and if you fall through the cracks? It isn’t usually worth it to chase you. That’s the way debt law works. Most debt buyers, and a lot of original creditors, too, don’t have what they need to win if you fight, and frankly they don’t care. They get their 99. Your job is to be the one that slips through the cracks.
Now, do you need us for all of that?
Yes and no. Of course you could probably figure things out… if you had time, but time can be scarce when you’re being sued, and there’s a lot to know. We give it to you in manageable bites.
And speaking of manageable bites, let’s go ahead and talk about memberships with Your Legal Leg Up and you probably want one if you’re thinking about defending yourself from the debt collector.
First, why not get a lawyer?
You know the answer to this: money. Lawyers are expensive, and debt defense lawyers often charge almost as much as the debt collectors want to get from you. It’s a business, right? But for most people, getting a lawyer is out of their price range.
And there’s another problem: getting a GOOD debt defense lawyer. Our members tell us that most of the lawyers they talk to seem more interested in settling the case than defending it. They want you to pay – a lot – to get this done. I’m not saying this kind of lawyer won’t do you any good at all, but chances are you can do much, much better for yourself.
Your Legal Leg Up
You probably know us from our videos – we’ve done quite a few, and while I must admit that the sound quality hasn’t always been the best, our ideas HAVE been, and they’ve saved a lot of people a lot of money. They can do that for you, too. If you’ve looked at the comments on our videos at Youtube, you know a lot of people have found our materials helpful.
If you’ve seen our videos, you know we know what we’re talking about, based on a lot of years of experience, both back when I was a lawyer in court, and since then in helping people with their cases through Your Legal Leg Up. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I’m one of the foremost authorities on debt law in America. And more than that, on helping pro se litigants win their cases.
We have a record of success – and our success comes only when our members succeed in beating the debt collectors.
Memberships
We have three levels of membership that cover three areas of the law. We have a Gold Level Membership in Debt Defense, in Credit Repair, and Debt Negotiation. Our Platinum Membership combines the Gold Memberships and gives you all three for the price of one. And our Diamond Memberships give you even more.
If you join us at our Gold Litigation Member level, you will four main things:
- Litigation Manual
- Document Bank
- Teleconferences
- Three Weaknesses Report
They work together to orient you to debt litigation, help you figure out what you need to do, understand what they’re doing, and know the main points of attack you should consider. Through it all, you’ll learn enough to apply your own judgment and knowledge to the situation as it develops so you can be ready to handle anything that comes up.
Litigation Manual
This was our original product. It explains the litigation process from start to finish, talks about the people and companies involved, and tells you what they want. It also tells you what to expect, what things will be called, what to expect in court… pretty much everything you need explained in about 250 pages. When you finish the Litigation Manual, you’ll understand what’s going on.
Document Bank
But we’ve figured out that there’s a difference between knowing what’s going on and what to do and actually doing it. There’s a lot of repetition in litigation, and most people involved in lawsuits are going to face some similar issues. What if we could give you a little help there?
We can’t give you ready-made forms because you might just use those without making sure they’re right for your case. And the fact is, people’s cases are different enough from each other so that we couldn’t tell you what to do if we wanted to. But our document bank does the next best thing: it’s got samples and examples of things that have worked. You’ll find questions to ask, things to say, ways to object, and many more things that could help you along the way. You’ll still have to use your judgment, but this will save you many hours of trying to figure out what to say and how to say it.
Teleconferences
No matter how well prepared you are, how much you study and learn, there are still going to be things you don’t understand. They come up because the other side is trying to trick you, wear you out, or in some other way make you give up – that’s the way they make their money. To counter this, we have our teleconferences.
Teleconferences are live conversations that happen at least twice a week for gold members. It’s a chance for you to ask questions about what something means, what the other side is doing, or what you might want to do next. They’re strategy and coaching and teaching sessions all put together. If you’ve watched my videos and had questions, this is how you get to ask them. They last anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half – I never like to leave a question unanswered.
And there’s another thing about the teleconferences. You’ll hear other people in the same boat talking about what’s happening to them, what they’re doing, and what the bad guys are doing. Everybody knows that millions and millions of people are being sued by the debt collectors, but when it comes to YOU being sued you feel all alone. This reminds you that you aren’t, that there are lots of other people in the same boat. And their ideas can be your ideas. What they do that works might work for you. As the saying goes, advice, answers, consultation, worth about $100 per hour. Knowing that other people are facing the same thing… priceless.
Three Weaknesses Report
In addition to the materials we’ve developed to help teach you about the debt collection process in general and to develop your judgment when new things come up, we’ve discovered certain things that are common to almost all debt collectors, and even many original creditors. Because this is something that can help so many people, we’ve put together a report called “The Three Weaknesses almost Every Debt Collector Has, and How you Can Use them to Blow their Case out of the Water.”
A long title for an exceptionally useful report.
I tell people that I almost always try to write in plain English and avoid “lawyer-talk” or other stuff that’s hard to understand. But the Three Weaknesses Report is a little tougher than a lot of stuff I write because it applies close legal reasoning and analysis to a situation that is probably a lot like yours. I don’t usually cite case law or speak of the law in specific jurisdictions. In the Three Weaknesses Report I do, though. You’re still going to have to decide what part of it applies to your situation, but for those parts that do, this will go a long way towards winning the case for you.
Diamond Memberships
Why you Should Join us as a Diamond Member
Diamond Membership is our best deal for people with a lot of curiosity, more than one lawsuit, or who are coaching or helping others in their cases. That’s because a main goal of Diamond membership is to go beyond the usual questions presented by debt law and the debt industry. We look at the politics and economics driving our country. And we look deeply at the law.
As anyone knows who has read our materials, most of debt law is what we call “factory work.” It’s routine and standardized, and this is simply because debt is bought and sold in gigantic deals (called “tranches”). So the average debt collector buys a hundred or a thousand (or many, many more) accounts that supposedly owe money from the same company (usually a credit card-issuing bank) and then, completely relying on the records the bank provides, harasses the people involved to collect as much as possible. And eventually they file many, many lawsuits that look almost exactly the same.
So for most of our purposes, we can simply deal with that large body of identical suits and create responses to them. They’re doing factory work, and we do something very similar.
Going Deeper and Further
But there can be more. While debt collection is generally pretty standardized, there are things that can come up that either present special challenges or issues. And in fact, for all of its routine, most debt lawsuits CAN veer out of the normal. There are always angles in every case, which can sometimes make a difference, and often make things more interesting.
You’ll get a 50% discount off all of our motions packs and other materials. We highly recommend the First Response Kit as a way to simplify your first several steps in this litigation, and you’ll get a 50% discount off the cost for that.
And some of our members like to help others. For these – for people helping others, and for those who want to know a LOT about the law – our Diamond Membership is great.
Special Tactics
When you take on debt negotiation, debt litigation and credit repair at the same time, you discover that some of the tools work for more than one thing. For example, if a debt collector is bugging you AND has damaged your credit, you can dispute the collector’s action both through the Credit Reporting Act and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. These two acts have different purposes (as laws) and requirements. Verification under the two acts is different, and verification under the Credit Reporting Act is more difficult and rigorous for the debt collector – and the CRA also gives you a way to attack the original creditor as well if it is reporting you.
And you can, of course, you can use any and all the information you get through either the FDCPA and CRA (also called the FCRA, for “Fair Credit Reporting Act”) in litigation if they sue you. And you can use any information you get in a lawsuit they – or you – file, in attacking their responses under the FDCPA or FCRA. In other words, knowing all three sets of rules can sometimes be very, very helpful. Our Platinum Membership opens some of those ways up to you.
Other Benefits
As with each of the Gold Memberships, you will receive special reports and offers. As a Diamond Member, though, you get them all. This includes:
Diamond Benefits
In addition to everything the Gold and Platinum members get, Diamond members get a lot more information. They get, basically, all of our reports and books as well as ecourses. This includes our reports like Got Debt? and What if I (think I) Really Owe, Do You Need a Lawyer, and all the rest. And it also includes our book – now being revised – called Special Issues in Debt Litigation. This book was originally about a 250 page book, but it is being revised into several smaller volumes now. Diamond Members will get them, free.
Coaching
In addition to the written materials, Diamond members will get their own teleconferences when the situation calls for it. As we approach our membership goals, the Diamond members will need to discuss things in greater depth and at greater length – they’ll get that opportunity. And there will be other materials, currently in the works, to help them organize, promote, analyze, and all the other things they’re likely to need.
How You Purchase
You buy by clicking on “Register” under “About Memberships” in the main menu and choosing the level of membership you want.
Diamond membership costs $25.00 per month with a $150 sign-up fee.
Gold Litigation Membership
What Gold Membership Is, What it Costs
We talked generally about memberships in Introducing Memberships. That article gave a little of the history of this site and why we currently offer and emphasize memberships.
To repeat, briefly, what we said there, the law firms and companies specializing in debt collection have certain advantages over pro se litigants – or even represented defendants. These advantages include the ability to handle numerous cases at the same time, to build up document banks or resources so they can simply use the same materials over and over, and the ability to talk to other people doing the same thing so they can use what worked in someone else’s case in their own.
There’s really nothing we can do about their ability to handle more than one case at a time – except to try to take that away from them. That’s a key to Your Legal Leg Up’s strategy in general. By pressing the defense of our cases, pushing the discovery, arguing motions, and most of the other things we suggest, you will force the debt collector to attend to your case on an individual basis. This swings the advantages of economics in favor of the defendant. Whereas the debt collector starts by being able to handle perhaps a hundred cases at one time, by pressing your defense you force him to handle only one at a time. And they like to charge $200/hour. If you can work for under $200/hour, you’ll suddenly be doing things more cheaply than the plaintiff.
And they never know whether they’ll collect if they win.
But what of their other advantages?
Gold Membership provides:
Member-only Materials and Teleconferences
Our member-only collection of articles and videos exists to help you overcome the main advantages of the debt collectors. You still must do individual work, but now it much less like drudgery and more useful and effective. They have standardized documents, and now you can get standardized documents at a discount, too. They talk to each other, and now you, through our member-only materials, have access to new strategies as well.
But probably the main benefit of membership is our teleconferences. They give you a chance, twice per week, to ask specific questions of our staff at Your Legal Leg Up. With all appropriate modesty, I feel quite certain that we are among the very most knowledgeable people on this area of the law in the whole country. We’ve certainly put out more videos and articles, haven’t we? And as a lawyer I represented dozens and dozens of debt defendants – and Your Legal Leg Up, in over ten years of existence, has helped far more than that. I doubt anyone has anywhere near as much experience helping people with these cases.
And you get to tap into that twice per week. We’ll get your questions answered, too. You won’t spend a lot of the time on the phone listening to others and then hang up without answers – we go as long as necessary to make sure you get your questions answered. These things give you tools that streamline the debt defense process and take some of the doubt and worry out of it.
Just as important, the teleconferences allow you to give encouragement to others and be encouraged by them. It isn’t possible to join with others in defending your case, but this is as close as it gets. It will feel like you’re on a team, and for many people that feeling can make all the difference in results.
So What Does It Cost?
Gold Membership costs $10 per month, and there’s a $60 sign-up fee. That covers the built-in costs of writing and keeping the Litigation Manual up to date and of creating so many of the other materials.
You will Probably Also Want to Get
You will probably want to get our First Response Kit to help get you started on the right foot. It may be all you need other than the membership. It includes an article outlining what to do, how to answer or decide on a motion to dismiss, and an extensive sample of discovery that you can modify to suit your situation. It will take many hours out of the defense process for you.
10,000 Members
Our goal is to grow to 10,000 members. That would allow us to hire additional people and expand our materials and services quite a bit. And THAT would help even more – many more – people beat the debt collectors. I like to say that the debt collectors run a “factory” type enterprise, where they get their judgments and are content to let a few people slip through the cracks. If we could get a lot more people to defend themselves, and to do it right and energetically, we could make it impossible for the debt collectors to use a factory approach at all.
And given the current state of affairs, that would probably shut them down completely. Think about it – instead of bringing 100 cases at a time and spending (as one debt collector admitted in a case I was involved in) 18 minutes to gather information, file a case, and pursue it ALL the way to judgment, they’d have to handle it like real cases. The lawyers would have to check the facts before they filed, gather evidence, and do the things most lawyers do – it’s hard work! And most debt companies just wouldn’t do it. They couldn’t.
How You Purchase
You buy by clicking on “Register” under “About Memberships” in the main menu and choosing the level of membership you want.
Platinum Memberships
Platinum Memberships combine all three of the Gold Memberships into one package.
As we often say, debt problems generally travel in crowds – that is, if one debt collector is suing you, others are probably harassing and getting ready to sue you – and still others are messing up your credit report. It’s tempting to try to focus on just one of these things at a time, and that can work. But a more effective way of dealing with debt problems is to take them all on at the same time. So even while you’re beating the debt collector that’s suing you, you’re negotiating with another one to keep it from suing you.
And you’re beginning the process of repairing your credit from ALL of them.
If that makes sense to you, then you should consider our Platinum Membership.
Benefits of Platinum Membership
With our Platinum Membership you get three manuals: the Debt Litigation Manual, the Debt Negotiation and Settlement Manual, and the Credit Repair and Restoration Manual.
You also get access to our complete member-only area, so that you can reduce the amount of repetitive paperwork you have to do in taking care of all these problems, and you get access to all our member-only articles and videos on all topics.
And you can be part of all of our teleconferences.
Special Tactics
When you take on debt negotiation, debt litigation and credit repair at the same time, you discover that some of the tools work for more than one thing. For example, if a debt collector is bugging you AND has damaged your credit, you can dispute the collector’s action both through the Credit Reporting Act and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. These two acts have different purposes (as laws) and requirements. Verification under the two acts is different, and verification under the Credit Reporting Act is more difficult and rigorous for the debt collector – and the CRA also gives you a way to attack the original creditor as well if it is reporting you.
And you can, of course, you can use any and all the information you get through either the FDCPA and CRA (also called the FCRA, for “Fair Credit Reporting Act”) in litigation if they sue you. And you can use any information you get in a lawsuit they – or you – file, in attacking their responses under the FDCPA or FCRA. In other words, knowing all three sets of rules can sometimes be very, very helpful. Our Platinum Membership opens some of those ways up to you.
Other Benefits
As with each of the Gold Memberships, you will receive special reports and offers. As a Platinum Member, though, you get them all. This includes:
10,000 Member Drive
As I point out in our materials on Gold Membership, a key strategy in our debt litigation program is to recognize that debt collectors take a “factory” approach. They file huge numbers of cases and work very little on them because most people either default immediately or give up quickly. So they file a hundred cases, work on none of them, get judgments on 98 percent of the cases they get served, and let a few people get away. Our program helps you be among those who get away “through the cracks.”
But what if everybody defended and fought back?
If that happened, the debt collectors would have to change completely, and until they did, pretty much EVERYBODY would get away from them. Our 10,000 member drive is about making that happen. If everybody fought back, it would shut down the debt collectors and push the judges to stop being mere cogs in the debt collection industry’s machine. With that many people fighting back, learning, watching the courts, and pushing back, it would change the nature of the debt industry completely. I think that would be a good thing.
And so I have begun a 10,000 member drive.
How You Purchase
You buy by clicking on “Register” under “About Memberships” in the main menu and choosing the level of membership you want. Platinum membership costs $20 a month with a $120 sign-up fee.
Follow-up 7A to People being Sued for Debt
I often say that the trick to beating the debt collectors is “defending intelligently.” You have to know a few things and do a few things right. If you do, you’ll probably win.
So what, exactly, do I mean by defending intelligently? What do you have to do?
It’s simple. You have to find out what they have in the way of evidence and weigh their chances of proving their case. If it’s the rare situation where they have what they need, then you will probably want to think about settling the case – you’ll be able to do it for much less if you’ve done some work defending it. But most of the time you’ll find weaknesses in their case. Then your job is to push the case to some sort of resolution where they either drop the case or you win.
It is simple, and taken in small enough steps, it isn’t all that hard, either.
Remember, this isn’t much like most legal work, where the lawyers tend to be quite smart and to work very hard on every case. This really is more like factory work. They’ll get their 99, and if you fall through the cracks? It isn’t usually worth it to chase you. That’s the way debt law works. Most debt buyers, and a lot of original creditors, too, don’t have what they need to win if you fight, and frankly they don’t care. They get their 99. Your job is to be the one that slips through the cracks.
Now, do you need us for all of that?
Yes and no. Of course you could probably figure things out… if you had time, but time can be scarce when you’re being sued, and there’s a lot to know. We give it to you in manageable bites.
And speaking of manageable bites, let’s go ahead and talk about memberships with Your Legal Leg Up and you probably want one if you’re thinking about defending yourself from the debt collector.
First, why not get a lawyer?
You know the answer to this: money. Lawyers are expensive, and debt defense lawyers often charge almost as much as the debt collectors want to get from you. It’s a business, right? But for most people, getting a lawyer is out of their price range.
And there’s another problem: getting a GOOD debt defense lawyer. Our members tell us that most of the lawyers they talk to seem more interested in settling the case than defending it. They want you to pay – a lot – to get this done. I’m not saying this kind of lawyer won’t do you any good at all, but chances are you can do much, much better for yourself.
Your Legal Leg Up
You probably know us from our videos – we’ve done quite a few, and while I must admit that the sound quality hasn’t always been the best, our ideas HAVE been, and they’ve saved a lot of people a lot of money. They can do that for you, too. If you’ve looked at the comments on our videos at Youtube, you know a lot of people have found our materials helpful.
If you’ve seen our videos, you know we know what we’re talking about, based on a lot of years of experience, both back when I was a lawyer in court, and since then in helping people with their cases through Your Legal Leg Up. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I’m one of the foremost authorities on debt law in America. And more than that, on helping pro se litigants win their cases.
We have a record of success – and our success comes only when our members succeed in beating the debt collectors.
Memberships
We have three levels of membership that cover three areas of the law. We have a Gold Level Membership in Debt Defense, in Credit Repair, and Debt Negotiation. Our Platinum Membership combines the Gold Memberships and gives you all three for the price of one. And our Diamond Memberships give you even more.
If you join us at our Gold Litigation Member level, you will four main things:
They work together to orient you to debt litigation, help you figure out what you need to do, understand what they’re doing, and know the main points of attack you should consider. Through it all, you’ll learn enough to apply your own judgment and knowledge to the situation as it develops so you can be ready to handle anything that comes up.
Litigation Manual
This was our original product. It explains the litigation process from start to finish, talks about the people and companies involved, and tells you what they want. It also tells you what to expect, what things will be called, what to expect in court… pretty much everything you need explained in about 250 pages. When you finish the Litigation Manual, you’ll understand what’s going on.
Document Bank
But we’ve figured out that there’s a difference between knowing what’s going on and what to do and actually doing it. There’s a lot of repetition in litigation, and most people involved in lawsuits are going to face some similar issues. What if we could give you a little help there?
We can’t give you ready-made forms because you might just use those without making sure they’re right for your case. And the fact is, people’s cases are different enough from each other so that we couldn’t tell you what to do if we wanted to. But our document bank does the next best thing: it’s got samples and examples of things that have worked. You’ll find questions to ask, things to say, ways to object, and many more things that could help you along the way. You’ll still have to use your judgment, but this will save you many hours of trying to figure out what to say and how to say it.
Teleconferences
No matter how well prepared you are, how much you study and learn, there are still going to be things you don’t understand. They come up because the other side is trying to trick you, wear you out, or in some other way make you give up – that’s the way they make their money. To counter this, we have our teleconferences.
Teleconferences are live conversations that happen at least twice a week for gold members. It’s a chance for you to ask questions about what something means, what the other side is doing, or what you might want to do next. They’re strategy and coaching and teaching sessions all put together. If you’ve watched my videos and had questions, this is how you get to ask them. They last anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half – I never like to leave a question unanswered.
And there’s another thing about the teleconferences. You’ll hear other people in the same boat talking about what’s happening to them, what they’re doing, and what the bad guys are doing. Everybody knows that millions and millions of people are being sued by the debt collectors, but when it comes to YOU being sued you feel all alone. This reminds you that you aren’t, that there are lots of other people in the same boat. And their ideas can be your ideas. What they do that works might work for you. As the saying goes, advice, answers, consultation, worth about $100 per hour. Knowing that other people are facing the same thing… priceless.
Three Weaknesses Report
In addition to the materials we’ve developed to help teach you about the debt collection process in general and to develop your judgment when new things come up, we’ve discovered certain things that are common to almost all debt collectors, and even many original creditors. Because this is something that can help so many people, we’ve put together a report called “The Three Weaknesses almost Every Debt Collector Has, and How you Can Use them to Blow their Case out of the Water.”
A long title for an exceptionally useful report.
I tell people that I almost always try to write in plain English and avoid “lawyer-talk” or other stuff that’s hard to understand. But the Three Weaknesses Report is a little tougher than a lot of stuff I write because it applies close legal reasoning and analysis to a situation that is probably a lot like yours. I don’t usually cite case law or speak of the law in specific jurisdictions. In the Three Weaknesses Report I do, though. You’re still going to have to decide what part of it applies to your situation, but for those parts that do, this will go a long way towards winning the case for you.
Follow-up 6A to People being Sued for Debt
Yesterday I ended with a promise to talk about something that worries a lot of people. It seems to worry them even more than the possibility of losing, actually. What is that?
The fear of standing up in court and talking.
You would be amazed at how many of our members start out by saying they’d be happy to do anything but go into court and face the other side.
That’s very understandable. You figure the lawyer on the other side knows more than you do, can say things that embarrass you, and that you won’t say what needs to be said when the time comes.
It doesn’t happen like that, though. The process is much more gradual. Generally, you’ll start by answering the petition. That’s really easy – you just write down your response to each paragraph of the petition against you. In fact, it usually looks something like this:
Wherefore, defendant requests this Court dismiss the petition with prejudice.
That will take you ten minutes to write – you don’t even have to type it in most courts. But to get to this point, you will have read some of our materials about debt collectors and the collection process. You’ll learn a little about what they’re suing you for and what law they’re trying to use.
You’ll start the learning process, in other words.
Then you’ll create some “discovery,” which is questions you ask them to answer. Not just any questions, though – questions designed to get the most information that matters from them. It’s kind of an art, but we have materials you can use as a guide, and you can find out much, much more at the teleconferences. By the time you have written the discovery, you will know much more about your case – and it will still be easy. This isn’t rocket science.
But it is a learning process. And as you work your way through the discovery and talk to us at teleconferences about it you’re actually learning a very important skill: HOW to talk about this stuff. After a few teleconferences, if you’re like most of our members, you’ve gotten used to the idea, and in reality you could talk about this stuff with anybody.
Fortunately (or un, as the case may be), the debt collectors do not seem to be able to respond to discovery without trying to stonewall you. That’s actually lucky, because you’re going to see – it will be very obvious – how dumb many of their objections are, how repetitive, and just how made-up they are. And then you’re going to call them and negotiate with their lawyer to send you the stuff. Now you’re doing two very important things: you’re making them spend expensive lawyer-time talking to you, and you’re learning how to talk about this stuff with someone who isn’t cooperative. It isn’t hard at all, as you will see – and you’re also learning the materials better as well as developing your case.
In many cases, that’s as far as it goes. They drop the case. But if they don’t, you will continue with the process, eventually talking to the judge.
And you’re going to find out that the judge may not know the law on this stuff as well as you do by now. You’ll have an agenda, you’ll have things to say, and the fact that it’s a judge no longer scares you. If it goes to trial, it will feel like almost any other argument you’ve ever had where you felt right.
And that’s really the way it’s probably going to go for you.
Sometimes the lawyer is smarter than you, often times not, but it doesn’t matter. The lawyer is just doing a job, and by this time so are you – it’s just that you will be much better prepared than the lawyer, and you’ll have what you need, while he probably won’t. The judge will be a little patronizing at first, but she will see what you’re doing soon enough.
No member has ever told me that he or she felt unprepared for court, and almost all of them have reported feeling quite comfortable. Most, it seems, have been congratulated on a job well done by the judge afterwards.
This is not an exaggeration – it really is this way. “But why?” You may wonder.
Remember that I said 97 percent of these cases either default or give up. That means neither the lawyer nor the judge expects much from you. It can take a while for it to sink in that something different is happening, but they will actually appreciate what you’re doing. Even the lawyer for the other side will, although he probably won’t tell you so. It’s refreshing and nice to see someone stand up for herself, and interesting when that person knows what she’s doing. Plus, and this is also quite important: the law is on your side. They really don’t have what they need to win. That means YOU should win.
The debt collector lawyer isn’t going to hate you for beating him, not that it would matter – it’s just a day’s work for him. I could tell you funny things about judges, too, but for now just take my word for it – most of them are all right, and they’ll be all right with you defending yourself.
The experience is so amazingly different than what most people come into the program expecting that it changes the way you look at lawyers and the law forever. Or so many members have told me. Of course they’re trying to get your money, and it’s serious stuff in one way. You have to do your work. But if you do – and we’ll do our best to make sure you do – you’ll probably be glad you went through it all.
And winning is oh so sweet. You can say good bye to a debt that’s probably been worrying you for quite some time. And by winning you’re more than halfway to getting the thing removed from your credit report.
Follow-up 5A to People being Sued
Yesterday I ended with something that may have surprised you – or you may possibly even have thought it was wrong to do, somehow. That is, I was talking about how the expense of your defense might eventually make the debt collector go away all by itself.
And that is true. But is it wrong to use the cost of litigation as a tool against the debt collector?
I could almost laugh at that, but in a way it’s a serious question.
It is, in fact, considered unethical in law to use the cost of litigation as a tool – if you aren’t doing legitimate things. That is, you aren’t supposed to drive up the costs needlessly. Now why did I almost laugh at that? Because the debt collectors do that CONSTANTLY. You will see that when you ask “discovery” questions, no matter how reasonable, they will object with a bunch of the lamest stuff imaginable. It’s called “stone-walling,” and you should expect it – it’s standard in the debt collector’s playbook.
But you won’t be stone-walling. You will be legitimately probing their case for weaknesses, and chances are extremely good that you will find some, too. So at the same time you’re making the suit unprofitable for them you are also making it much more likely that you win it outright.
And it is likely that you win if it goes so far.
It goes back to the “factory” approach the debt collectors take. I’d be shocked to hear that the lawyer on the other side of your case has spent twenty seconds looking at anything in your case before going to court. Why should he? Ninety-seven out of a hundred cases never get litigated because the defendants give up. It doesn’t make sense to “waste” time on a case like that, and they almost never do. And because of the way the debt selling industry works, in order for them to get what they need, it would really take more time than they’ve got. Upshot? They rarely have what they need, and they’re rarely willing to get it if you push them for it.
Again, they aren’t worried about losing. They’re worried about spending time.
If you keep pushing, you’ll almost always win.
Almost Always??
Hmmm. So do you notice I keep saying things like “rarely” and “almost always” or “almost never?”
One YouTube commenter accused me of “waffling” – he liked the people who make guarantees better and figures I don’t know enough if I can’t make guarantees, too.
But that is actually ridiculous. The law is a process – usually pretty rigorous, and usually actually “honest” if not truly fair. It’s a contest played by many, many participants. Some (on both sides) play harder than others, and judges do not always pay close attention or do the right thing. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
What I can say for sure is that if you do, and keep doing, the right things, you will make suing you a money-losing proposition. This makes it much less likely that they will keep doing it.
I can say for sure that a large majority of debt buyers – very nearly all of them, in fact – start the lawsuit against you without having what they would need to win in their possession. And they either cannot, or will not, do what it takes to get it. Could they, in theory? Yes they could. But I am not aware of a single time a debt buyer did what it took to deserve to win. Sometimes they do win if the judge isn’t paying attention or the deck is stacked (as it is in Massachusetts small claims courts), but this is rare if you fight, and it’s much rarer for them to win legitimately.
I will have guarantees about our products, of course, but you should know that if the debt collector is willing to do what it takes to win, and if the stuff is there, then it probably should win, and it probably will. That almost never happens, so you should probably win and probably will win, but there’s always a chance of some fluke happening. We can’t guarantee that you will win.
It’s important that you know about that chance, as small as it is, because it will encourage you to do things that protect you against that possibility. We do have some suggestions for that, too.
But that’s all talking about something with such a small chance of happening that I wonder sometimes whether I shouldn’t just say it won’t.
Remember, the debt collectors are only interested in making money – they don’t care about you or your suit at all (except as a way to make money). We can help you make sure they lose money by suing you. And we can make sure that if they don’t have what they need, which they almost never do, you can find out and know what to do about that. We can make sure you deserve to win, in other words.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about one more thing that makes people nervous, and then we’ll move on to tell you how we can help and what we offer.
Stay hopeful,
Ken
Follow-up 4A to People being Sued for Debt
Yesterday I told you something that might have struck you as odd. I said that being sued by the debt collector could be the fastest way to get rid of the debt, and that it was ironic that so many people gave up.
Now, let’s keep something straight. I’m not saying that being sued is a good thing, that it doesn’t have some risks or that it doesn’t “waste” a lot of time. Law suits are scary and risky, and you’re much better off if they never happen in most ways.
But even though that is all true, it is also true that if you fight intelligently you have an extremely good chance of winning against a debt buyer. And winning such a lawsuit is the fastest way by far of getting the debt out of your life completely. Not just the debt itself, but much of the damage to your credit.
How can this be so?
Consider what happens when debt collectors bug you. Somebody very low on the totem pole calls you up and demands money. If you’ve ever tried to negotiate, seriously, with these people, then you know they simply don’t have any authority to do anything for you. It costs the company ten bucks an hour to talk to you, so there’s little incentive to move things along – other than by getting you to pay, right?
If you persist, you’ll slowly move up the totem pole, but you’ll never get to anyone who’s being paid much. And that means that they rarely have incentive to move things along. They know there’s a good chance you’ll get tired before they do.
It is possible you’ll get someone who will agree that the best thing to do would be to accept a low payment, and this usually happens, if at all, when you convince them that you really don’t have anything to collect. Try getting them to clear your credit record then.
I’m not saying it cannot possibly be done. Just that it rarely is. You have to convince them that you can’t afford to pay, and then you have to try to get them to help you fix your credit. Why would they do that?
It works differently when you’re being sued.
At first, you’ll have a hard time reaching the lawyer – they have layers designed to prevent that because lawyers get paid a lot. But as you work your way through the case, the lawyer finds that he HAS to get involved. So now, instead of talking to a ten buck an hour employee, you’re talking to someone who really wants to be paid at least $150.
And as you work your way through the case, you’re requiring this $150/hour guy to put more and more time into the case. He’s paid to think, and he’s going to think you’re a wrench in his machine – his money-making machine.
And that’s just what you will be.
Here’s the thing to remember. Debt lawyers never worry about losing a case. They don’t think you can make them lose, and it doesn’t cost them anything to lose either. All they want is as much money as they can get, and so what they worry about is having to spend time and money on your case. It makes sense.
Look at it this way – if you could file 99 lawsuits and get $500,000 of judgments in a few hours, what would you do if the 100th suit looked like it was going to take ten hours? Or twenty? Mostly, you’d look for a way to drop that 100th suit and look for another 99 like the first bunch, wouldn’t you? Well, there are complications, but that’s really what most debt lawyers do.
That can’t make it too easy – or most of them think they can’t. Now, there are some debt collectors who go away if you require verification the first time they contact you, but a lot don’t. And there are some debt collectors who drop a suit if you file an answer or serve discovery on them, or whatever. But you never really know (ahead of time) where their line is going to be. Is an answer enough? Discovery? Filing a motion? Beating a motion (that they file)?
You never know.
What you can know is that if you keep doing the right things, the cost of the suit to the debt collector keeps going up. Eventually, the chances are they’ll drop it.
But I’ll tell you something important about that tomorrow.
Regards and stay hopeful,
Ken
Follow-up 3A to People being Sued for Debt
Yesterday we were talking about the factory approach so typical of most debt collectors. We talked about how a few lawyers could gather hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of judgments in an hour or two. And we said that what made that work was that people give up and let them have those judgments one way or another.
Why do people being sued do that?
I’ve talked to a lot of people in this situation and know very well the mix of guilt and helplessness most people being sued feel. But it goes much deeper, as the debt collectors know very well. It starts when the debts start slipping out of control.
Let’s say you had a credit line that was perfectly appropriate, but then something happened to make it harder to keep up. At first you do keep up, then you start making minimum payments, and that is NOT keeping up – you’re losing ground, and you know it. It gets harder to pay close attention to the bill because every time you do you get reminded that you aren’t keeping up. And of course there is a ridiculous amount of interest to pay.
If you miss a payment, it gets much, much worse. Suddenly you have late-payment penalties on top of horrible interest. It’s all you can do to look at the bottom line, decide what, if anything, you can pay, and put it away for another month.
If that happens a few times you stop looking at the bill at all and just shove it into a drawer for “later.” Or you just throw it away. I mean, you can’t do anything about it, so why rub your nose in it, right?
Something like this happens an amazing amount of the time, and before long you have no idea how much you really owe, or how much you borrowed. You may keep a general running tab in your mind of the total, but who could say how much was interest, penalties, or principle? That stops mattering because there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.
Then the debt collectors start calling. They don’t want to talk about how the debt piled up, and they don’t want to argue about fees. They want to know how much you can pay and by when.
Before long, all you know is that you owe some money, probably a lot, and if they sell the debt to someone else, you may just figure you probably owe it to the person calling you.
When that happens and then you get sued, a lot of people just think it’s easier to “go with the flow.” They know they owe some money and figure it’s to the person suing them. They figure the company suing them has what it needs to win and knows what it’s doing. So they give up one way or another – this is the day they’ve been expecting for a long time.
It’s ironic, because in reality this could be the easiest way to eliminate the debt altogether.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you why.
Follow-up 2A to People Being Sued
Yesterday I was telling you about Frank, Shirley and Kelly, and I could have told you about dozens, possibly hundreds, more. Their stories are typical of people being sued by debt collectors, and they’re typical of the people who choose to stand up and fight.
You may have noticed I didn’t say anything about whether Frank, Shirley or Kelly actually owed any money.
Actually, they probably did. There was some question in my mind about Kelly’s suits, and in all of them there was certainly a question about how much was owed, or to whom. But did they owe the money to someone? I’m almost sure they did. That is the situation faced by a majority of people being sued by debt collectors, and it doesn’t matter.
Law suits are a question of evidence, as I will discuss a little later – the debt collectors have to prove you owe the money if you fight, and they usually can’t.
On the other side of that, I know of plenty of people who have told me they didn’t owe anybody any money, but they didn’t fight. In those cases, the debt collectors got their judgments. A lawsuit is a contest. It isn’t about what is true – it’s about what you can prove (or not). Beating the debt collector is first about answering and then making them prove their case. It takes more than that, though, because they do have tricks up their sleeves.
So let’s talk briefly today about the debt industry and their tricks. We’ll follow up on this tomorrow with how it plays out in court – and what you can do about it.
The Debt Industry
American debt – and particularly consumer debt – has run completely rampant over the past twenty years. Americans now owe over a trillion dollars in consumer debt (mostly credit card debt), and much of that is “stressed.” Auto loans are another trillion, much of it “stressed.” That is, the people owing are walking on a tight line, and if anything happens, they could get knocked off it. And stuff does happen. You know it does. After a couple of late payments, loans are considered stressed, and it doesn’t take much more for people to stop being able to pay at all.
It’s actually impossible to get definite numbers, but it looks like at least a million lawsuits get filed per year based on consumer debt. It may be far more than that. When I was practicing law almost ten years ago, it was not unusual for over a hundred cases to come up in a single day in a single court room. And on one day there were over 700 cases on the docket. On a single day! In a single court room! In one county – in Missouri, hardly the biggest or most daring state of the Union.
In other words, when we talk about debt collection, we are talking about a truly gigantic machine. And I don’t need to tell you that most of the people getting “processed” by that machine are not Rockefellers. No, they’re normal, regular people, who in many cases were lured into unsustainable debt – and in almost all the cases certainly never wanted not to pay what they owed. But stuff happens.
Debts
Consumer debt is “transferrable.” That means that if you owe me $100, I can sell the right to collect that money to someone else. Don’t fall for the people who say that isn’t true – I’ve seen some of their videos on Youtube, and they’ll get you in trouble. A whole lot of debt gets sold in the U.S.
What happens is that big creditors – and this is mostly the banks that issue credit cards – sell debt that is in default (“bad” debt) to companies that specialize in collecting it. These companies are pretty big, and they end up with a whole lot of “claims” they are trying to collect. That all make sense to you?
And so on those days I mentioned where there are a hundred – or several hundred – lawsuits in court on a single day, there might be only a few debt collectors, and a few lawyers representing them, there at the time.
How can they do all this? Only one way. For the process to work, almost everybody being sued has to give up!
Most of them do it by not showing up at all (defaulting), but plenty of them do it by showing up to sign “whatever” it takes to delay the problem for a while (“give-up settlements”). Not two in a hundred actually fight – and probably not even one.
That means a single lawyer could “process” several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of judgments in an hour or two. Not bad work if you can get it! – If you’re a lawyer who doesn’t mind doing that to people.
If you’ve watched some of my videos, you may have seen me talk about debt law being “factory” law, and that’s what I mean. One lawyer handling a hundred cases in an hour – that’s assembly line work. So what does that mean to you? And how can it be helpful to know?
Factory Work
Whether you are being sued by a debt buyer or original creditor, you are being sued by a company that has a certain, routine way of doing what they do. They follow this routine because (1) they have so many cases; and (2) they need to keep their expenses to a minimum; and (3) it usually doesn’t matter what they have or do because most people will automatically give up once the lawsuit is filed.
In that scenario, spending any money on building their case is a waste of money, and debt collectors don’t like to do that. So they don’t.
Please understand: I’m not saying debt collectors are dumb or lazy. Economics drives their decision to do almost nothing to prepare their cases. And it is these same economics that give us such a good chance of winning. Your key to defending yourself and what you have is to take intelligent action. If you can do that, you can turn the tables on them completely.
Sounds so simple, right? We’ll show you why it’s true tomorrow.
Regards,
Ken
Follow-up1A – to People being Sued
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