Legal Question in Credit and Debt Law in Florida

I suggest you call the Broward County Sheriff Deputy and have him return giving you the papers. YOu will have 20 days from the date of service to respond to them or you will need to appear at a pretrial conference and see if you can make a deal with them.

The first thing you should do is go to the Broward County Clerk of Courts website and perform a search on your name. You should perform this search in the civil court case search.Try and figure out who is suing you and for what. It is important to know if it is the original creditor or a debt buyer.

Once you have that information, you will be in a better position to make decisions. The process server will try again to serve you, when he or she does accept the papers. That way you have the ability to defend yourself against the lawsuit. If you don't accept them, a number of things can happened. First they could get a court order allowing them to serve you by publication, which means they post the lawsuit information for a specified time in a newspaper in Broward County (the legal notice section) and that is considered good service on you. If that happens, chances are you will get a default judgment against you, which is not a situation you want to happen. Another potential thing that happens in South Florida is that service is alleged to have been made and you have no idea it happened. Again, in this scenario you are heading towards a default judgment being entered against you. You have 20 days to respond to the complaint once it is served if you don't respond they can get a default judgment against you. Basically, they win without having to prove their case against you.

Why would you want that to happen? Be proactive in this situation, find out what you are being sued for, by who and make an informed decision about your strategy moving forward.