Asset Acceptance Judgment Settled

We were retained by a client who had a $35,000 judgment against her by Asset Acceptance, a common debt buyer. They had retained the debt collection law firm of Sharinn and Lipshie PC to sue our client and were able to obtain a default judgment against her because our client no longer lived at the address that she was served the summons and complaint to. Actually, our client had moved out of the old address over 10 years ago. The debt had accrued a large amount of judgment interest over the years which raised the total amount to roughly $35,000. Due to the high amount of the judgment, Asset Acceptance would be able to freeze double the amount of money in our client's account which would be $70,000 in this case. Fortunately, she only had about $7,500 in the account and 2,640 of that $7,500 was exempt income under the Exempt Income Protection Act.

We contacted Sharinn and Lipshie out of courtesy to give them a chance to vacate the judgment on their own without having to litigate the matter further. Unusually, they disagreed at first. We then filed an order to show cause with the court to vacate judgment and sent Sharinn and Lipshie a copy. They then reversed their position and agreed to vacate the judgment against our client and give her the opportunity to defend herself in court. They also contacted us and stated that they would prefer to settle the matter out of court. To save the client litigation costs, we settled the case for $7,500, almost 80% off of the balance owed on the judgment and a reduction of over $27,500!