Legal Question in Civil Litigation in Virginia

Re: Motion to Relieve a Party of Judgment

A motion can be filed by the defendant to vacate the judgment. However, such motion involving a claim of fraud upon the court needs to be supported by more than just the defendant's suspicions.

Re: Motion to Relieve a Party of Judgment

Well, first, you will not be able to succeed with any motion if you only "suspect" something. I am not saying not to look into it. But do understand that you will bear the burden of convincing the court that the motion should be granted, and you will need some strong arguments and hopefully some strong evidence.

There is a procedure under Va. Code 8.01-428 to set aside a judgment based on fraud on the court. The statute and the precedents don't really define too much what that means. Also there is a special procedure for default judgments when the motion for judgment was served on the wrong address and the defendant did not know about the lawsuit.

Judgments are set aside for reasons such as mistaken identity and if there was confusion about when the trial was supposed to be held, etc.

However, as a practical matter you would need to show fraud that went directly to the question of whether the judgment should have been entered or not. Simply because a lawyer said something inaccurate would not be enough. The judge would look at it this way: Would the judgment still be proper anyway?