Right off the bat I’ll mention that we have a lawyer and we also fully intend to settle with the plaintiff either before the court date or at it or however it plays out. We’ve (not to them, just with our lawyer) said that we owe the other party the money, we just dragged our feet on paying them and they sued us. Our fault, we owe them, we’ll pay, but that’s not the point here.
1)Anyways, so we brought the paperwork to our lawyer and the very first thing he said was ‘you weren’t served, that’s strange, I wonder why’. The summons was just in the owners mailbox (not sure if it was mailed or someone put it in there).
Why wouldn’t it have been served? I can see online there’s an ‘affidavit of non-service’ which seems to mean they couldn’t find us, however, they’ve known us for over 30 years. It would have been trivial for them to serve us at work (the billing address). My only guess is that they were actually trying to be nice and not embarrass the owner in front of his employees.
2)The didn’t sue the actual business, or even the owner, they sued one of our LLC’s. It’s just a corporation that our accountant had us set up for tax purposes, it’s not even the name that the plaintiff uses to bill us or the name on our checks when we (did) pay them. I assume their lawyer looked up the owners name and said ‘hmmm, this LLC is probably the business and the business name is probably a DBA’. Either way, without getting into the ins and outs of the LLC, the lawyer said ‘ya know, you can, if you want, just ignore the lawsuit, take the default judgement against you, and they’ll never be able to collect a penny since there’s nothing there to collect’. So, why sue the LLC, instead of the actual business (or the owner)? Further more, if we did go that route, are they allowed (yes, I know, but you know what I mean) to then sue business for the exact same thing based on suing the wrong entity the first time? (and just to reiterate, the owner wants to pay this and be done with it, so he didn’t pursue that option).
3)Looking at the Record of events, I see the original complaint, then a few weeks later another date were it says they were in court but we weren’t. This was all before we had any idea there was even a case to begin with. It’s not until after that, do I see Affidavit of Mailing, Publication of summons and Affidavit of non-service? Is it possible we missed a court date or is that just part of how this works?
Again, we have an attorney, we’re going to settle this, I’m not asking for legal advice, I’m just curious about a couple of these aspects that even our lawyer seems puzzled about when he first noticed.