Legal Question in Credit and Debt Law in New York

Re: judgements and collections

These two events are probably linked. The judgment means that a court has issued a mandate that you pay money to someone. Part of the mechanism for enforcing that mandate is an "information subpoena" issued to people that might owe you money, to set the wheels in motion to have them pay the judgment instead of you. If the judgment was entered without notice to you that you were being sued, that lack of notice is grounds to have the judgment vacated.

You need to take immediate action. Between the credit report and the subpoena, you should have enough information to ascertain where the action was filed and the index number of the case. You (or your attorney) need to go to the clerk's office and get the file. This is where things get tricky. There will be a great deal of information in the file. Some will be relevant to getting the judgment vacated on the ground that you were never served with the summons. Some will be relevant to your assertion of claims that the creditor violated the Federal Fair Debt Collection Practice Act. There is no way that any lawyer can help you thread this needle without being hired as your lawyer. The clerk of the court (assuming it's the Civil Court of the City of New York, Queens County; if you were sued outside of your home county, that in itself can be a FDCPA violation) is supposed to help you with forms and how to fill them out. But he can't help you with the FDCPA matter.

Your best bet is to go to a neighborhood law office, of the kind that handles automobile cases, with a copy of the court file AND all of the correspondence you have regarding the matter. Remind the paralegal or lawyer that FDCPA violations are very chic these days, lots of creditors have been caught with their pants around their ankles, and the statute provides for an award of attorneys' fees. The fee award is often larger than the recover. By this point, the office will either be drooling or unmoved.

Even if you don't have a FDCPA case, you need to attend to getting the judgment vacated, so you must not stick your head in the sand: you need to be proactive.

Good luck.

This post is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. It is a comment on the legal question posed by the poster and should not be relied upon unless and until an attorney-client relationship is entered into. Doing so would require signing an engagement letter and depositing a retainer to secure payment of legal fees.