Legal Question in Business Law in Virginia

Re: failure to answer timely creating unnessary financial burden

I don't know that I have enough information to

answer your question, but the biggest bit of

missing information is whether or not you

actually owe the money, or much of it, to the

plaintiff. The fact that the attorney failed to

answer on time is serious (although the attorney

could probably have fixed that if he had acted

quickly, in spite of being late). The fact that

you get a judgment against you may look bad.

But the real question is do you owe the money?

Or a large part of it?

Extending credit is a decision that each company

can make for any reason they want. They are not

required to put their money at risk, and so they

can refuse to extend credit for any reason or no

reason at all. That is the biggest difficulty in

answering your question. There are few legal

restrictions on someone NOT extending credit

(as long as it is not racially discriminatory,

that sort of thing).

As a result, although maybe something is not

occurring to me at the moment and my colleagues

will have other things to say, I think that you

have more of a P.R. and sales job in front of

you then a legal issue.

The fact that you had the judgments vacated

would, I think, be an extremely powerful tool.

You can go to the court and get a copy of those

orders by the judge and you can provide those

orders of vacation to anyone who already knows

about the original judgment with an explanation

and go and see them.

You may have a cause of action against the attorney for malpractice, but the fact that the

judgments were vacated also limits any monetary

damages you could claim against the attorney.

If you can prove loss of business or loss of

financing as a result, you MIGHT be able to

sue the attorney for this, although it would be

an unusual situation, compared to a direct loss

of money in a more typical way.

However, in all of this, the question will be do

you actually owe the money, or any part of it.

The fact that other business partners learned that you owe money won't mean much if in fact

you DO owe money. In that case the other creditors merely learned what was true, or true

in part. The fact that would be creditors found

out what was TRUE is not a wrong against you,

if that is what happened.

As a result, you might have to wait until you

actually win the original lawsuits (if they are

still going on) before you can sue.