You Were Defaulted and Have a Judgment Against You: Now What?

Imagine you are at your business, or at wherever your business headquarters may be. All of the sudden, you open your mail or email, and see that there has been a default judgment entered against you. You now owe money—perhaps a lot of money—to someone who sued you.

Except there’s one problem: you never had any idea you were being sued in the first place.

Why You May Not Have Known

This isn’t a scenario that is supposed to happen, but it does. To understand why it happens, and how you received that default judgment, you have to understand how service of a lawsuit works.

Our legal system and constitution gives all of us a due process right to notice of lawsuits and an opportunity to defend ourselves. That’s why we have process servicers—their job is to hand deliver lawsuits to people who are being sued, to ensure those people have the chance to timely respond to the lawsuit they are being served with.

Problems With Service

But sometimes, things go wrong. Things may go wrong on many ends.

It may go wrong on the process server’s end—the process server may serve the wrong person, or leave the lawsuit with someone, or at a location that you never actually received your service of the lawsuit.

Or, the problem may be on your end—maybe the lawsuit was properly served, but whoever got it from the process server never gave it to you, or you just overlooked it.

Whatever the reason, there is now a pending lawsuit and you aren’t responding to it, because you didn’t know about it. After time goes by, the court can enter a default judgment against you—essentially, a judgment against you for everything the Plaintiff asked for in the lawsuit. Your delay in responding has waived your chance to respond.

Overturning the Default

If this does happen, you do have the chance to overturn the default, essentially, reopening the case, and allowing you to defend yourself. However, this isn’t easy.

One way to overturn a judgment, is to say that the lawsuit was never properly served on you, which is why you didn’t know about or respond to it. You’ll have to show either the Plaintiff trying to serve you, or the process server, made a legal error in service of the suit.

But what if it was truly your fault for not responding? You’ll have to show the court that you acted diligently, and that the failure to respond to the Complaint was due to excusable neglect. This may be an extenuating circumstance, a bona fide error (like an incorrect mail or email address), or perhaps, that you relied on someone else to respond (like an insurance company or a lawyer) and they did not.

Courts don’t like overturning defaults—they like closing cases and moving to the next ones. So, they aren’t always anxious to overturn defaults. That’s why it’s best to respond to lawsuits when and if you get them, as quickly as possible.

See your business lawyer today if you’ve been served with a lawsuit. Call the West Palm Beach business litigation lawyers at Pike & Lustig today.

Sources:

media.floridabar.org/uploads/2018/08/form-79.pdf

casetext.com/rule/florida-court-rules/florida-rules-of-civil-procedure/rules/rule-1540-relief-from-judgment-decrees-or-orders