Responding to a Summons

It is critical to start responding to a summons as soon as your local sheriff hands you the complaint. Debtors are only given a short period of time, usually 20 days, to file an Answer to creditors’ allegations. This simple guide will help you in responding to a summons properly.

The summons will come with the complaint document. This document contains all the counts against you as well as the amount of money you allegedly owe your creditor. In itself, the summons is essentially notifying you that you have a certain number of days to responding to a summons or else, a default judgment is awarded to your creditor, giving them legal rights to take your bank savings and garnish your wages.

If the summons is ignored and your creditor wins the lawsuit, you will pay every cent of the total debt amount indicated in the Complaint plus interest on top of your creditor’s legal fees.  On the other hand, if you respond to the summons and answered each allegation with a list of your Affirmative Defenses with either an admit or deny response, your creditor will most likely drop the lawsuit altogether and move on to less informed debtors.

Responding to a summons is not that hard. However, it does take a lot of work on your part to obtain essential information you need to address debt claims as well as craft letters in legal form. 

Once you are done responding to a summons, you need to file it together with a Notice to Appear document.

When your creditor make the unexpected discovery that you know a thing or two about defending yourself in court, they won’t even go as far as go on with the proceedings because lawsuits are very expensive and they would much rather move on to other debtors than pay more than they have to to pursue a single debtor.

However, if the case was not dismissed, you will then have to respond to all your creditor’s Discovery and send out your own Discovery to the plaintiff. Once the Discovery is completed, the legal proceedings will start. Note that there is a very slim chance of going as far as being in trial but in case this happens, it’s best to either hire an attorney or get as much information as you can about defending yourself in court. 

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