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Whether or not you trust the news media about a declining US economy, one thing is for sure, debt collectors are frequently suits to collect debts. One large collection firm based out of Atlanta has indicated that they file approximately 279 collection lawsuits each day. A lawsuit is as usual the final strain in the creditor’s desire to gather a debt. If the harassing and often illegal collection calls were not enough, once a person is sued the reality of the case is realized. However, for the defendant, not all matter is lost. By the time the credit card company or other creditor files the credit card lawsuit, it may really be too late to legally take back the debt, if it is properly defended. Often times with the help of a lawyer a lawsuit to collect a debt may be defended, negotiated, or won out straight for the defendant. Before you start feeling sorry for the credit card company, keep in mind, they are the same organizarion that suggested an interest rate of 6.9% and if you were one day late on a payment raised the interest rate to 24.9%.

Back to the defense of the suit:

Theprime thing, “you need to answer lawsuit”. When a law suit is commenced, the name of the play for the debt collector is default judgment. A default judgment is the outcome of a lawsuit if the defendant can not cope to timely file a response. Default judgments are vital for the collectors because it implies they do not need to prove you owe the money, how much you should pay, and most essentially, and this is a secret, the specialist for the credit card organization or other creditor does not need to come to court.

Once a default judgment is entered, all of the probable defenses to the suit are lost, and no one has to go to court to prove the debt. Hence “always file an answer”. But, you have to be careful. In some jurisdictions nearly all of the defendant’s affirmative defenses should be filed at the time the first response is filed with the court or the defenses are wasted forever.

What type of credit card lawsuit defense are common in debt collection cases you ask? The most common are the statute of restrictions, statute of frauds, improper plaintiff, improper defendant, invalid debt transfer, breaking of bankruptcy discharge, and breaking of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The last one is not really a defense, but it function like one. Of course, most non-lawyers would have some difficulty defining which if any of the defenses are accessible in a particular case.