Default and CCJ

jamesd

Ryan10 wrote: »

It was an actual Solicitor. ... They claim to be debt recovery specialist and carried out the legal work on behalf of "1st credit Ltd"

Would you be kind enough to post a copy of the correspondence with the personal info removed? I'm asking in part because of MSE's campaign about misleading claims letters. It's hard to beat a solicitor seeking a CCJ they weren't even entitled to obtain.

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Wasn't the answer to defend the claim in the first place? ... Horse bolted springs to mind. Totally the wrong way to approach the issue.

The correct answer was for a solicitor not to threaten to then actually obtain a CCJ for a statute barred debt, implicitly making a false claim to the court that they were entitled to do so.

Alternative better solutions would have involved the bank contacting Ryan10 long ago or Ryan10 noticing long ago, so it never got as far as even one late payment. But what we have now appears to include a solicitor acting improperly to at least the extent of failing to provide proper oversight for those using their name.

Thrugelmir wrote: »

At the very least you would have received a claim notice from the court prior to the hearing. The solicitors were in contact so there's no issue with your address. Your response should have been to file a defence. Irrespective of the right and wrongs. If the judge was satisfied that the correct procedures had been followed by the claimant in an attempt to recover the debt, and with no response from yourself. Then by default the CCJ would be lodged against you.

it's worth remembering that we appear to have here a solicitor acting as though they were perfectly entitled to seek a CCJ and apparently exploiting a member of the public who was ignorant of the law at the time. Yes, in an ideal world everyone would know that a CCJ can't be obtained for a statute barred debt but a solicitor is supposed to be acting as an officer of the court and neither threatening to bring nor actually bring such cases to the court.

I'm entirely happy for Ryan10 to have paid the actual debt plus statutory interest. I'm not so happy about paying anything else given the debt collection and apparent professional misconduct involved.

jamesd

Ryan10, you may also want to read the SRA's "Warning notice Debt recovery work and relationships with debt recovery businesses" and the OFT debt collection guidance it links to.

I really hope that the solicitor you encountered isn't the person who actually sought the CCJ and that rather it was a failure to manage properly like the one in the SRA example.