Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

Re: Can I sue for a bill I signed for to help out a friend?

You can pay the bill to avoid the negative credit impact, and then sue her for the money she owes you. Collecting it may be another matter, though.

Re: Can I sue for a bill I signed for to help out a friend?

Since you are the one who contracted with the cell phone company you are the one who owes them the money. The cellular company can't go after your friend since they never reached an agreement with her. In fact, because she was a non-citizen with no SSN, they probably would have been unable to assess her creditworthiness and would have refused to contract with her if she had applied directly.

Assuming that your agreement with your friend calls for her to pay all the bills, then she owes the money to you. You can sue her for the money, but doing so will only help you if she actually has the money. If she is penniless then a judgment won't do much for you, at least in the near term.

Your suit will not technically be "for this bill" as you state in Part 1 of the question, but rather for breaching her agreement with you. So, in answer to Part 2 of your question, proving that the phone was for her personal use will not be relevant in the cellular company's case against you, but it would help in your case against her.

A potential problem for you is that there is a one-year statute of limitations on oral contracts; since you didn't mention a written agreement with your friend I must presume that your agreement was oral. You say that the agreement was reached three years ago, so you may have a problem. The one-year period begins from the time of breach and not from the time of the agreement; in many circumstances it will only begin when the plaintiff discovers the breach or when a reasonable person in his position would have learned of it.

Whether you can successfully sue her will thus depend on a number of facts which are not set forth in your inquiry. For one, you don't say whether she paid her bills for a while and then stopped paying, or when the most recent unpaid bill was due. These specifics are important here.

Part 3 of your question deals with immigration law and I do not know the answer. Perhaps another LawGuru attorney can help here, or you might want to re-post the question under the Immigration Law category.

As to Part 4, it seems your only recourse would be either a small claims action against this woman or a cross-complaint when the cellular company sues you. Keep in mind that, if you wait, the statute of limitations on your case against your friend might run out even if it hasn't already.

One more thing: Your contract with the cellular company probably includes an attorney fee clause, so you will have to pay a lot more in damages if you don't settle and you then lose at trial. She will not be responsible for this sum, as you have the obligation to mitigate your damages and can avoid this additional burden by paying the bill now.

Good luck.

Re: Can I sue for a bill I signed for to help out a friend?

Dohen and Hoffman gave the best advice.

Re: Can I sue for a bill I signed for to help out a friend?

You could sue in small claims court assuming you could show that there was an agreement between the two of you. Meanwhile, you may want to get the bill paid to avoid further adverse damage to your credit.