Consumer Law

Alabama FDCPA Lawsuit - Part Three - Defendant Is Served

By M. Stan Herring

After you file your federal court FDCPA lawsuit, the court will send a copy of the lawsuit to the defendant. Once the defendant receives a copy of the suit through the court, the defendant has 20 days to answer or respond to the lawsuit.

There are a number of ways to serve a federal court lawsuit but the easiest is to find the "registered agent" of the defendant and have the court serve the agent by certified mail. Normally the debt collector will be registered in Alabama so the secretary of state's website can give us this information. If you don't find it there, check out the websites of California, New York, Texas, Florida, etc. - the debt collector is probably registered in the bigger states or in its home state.

Once the defendant is served, then the response or answer will come next. That is what we will talk about in our next post.

If you are dealing with an abusive debt collector, please feel free to call us at 205-879-2447 or contact us through our website form. We look forward to helping you any way that we can.

Full post as published by Alabama Consumer Blog on June 08, 2009 (boomark / email).