More Thoughts on What People Get From Lawsuits

People often view the legal system as deciding what conduct is unacceptable. It provides consequences to people who do unacceptable things like breaching an agreement, stealing, and violence. But people may be unclear about what those consequences can be; the consequences may even be an afterthought. So I wrote a post about what a lawsuit can do to benefit the people who come to court to complain about someone else’s misconduct.

More Thoughts on Defaults

Judges do not just rubber stamp requests for default judgments. They often scrutinize a plaintiff’s request for one to make sure they served papers correctly and that they submitted adequate evidence to support their case.

Enforcement of Judgments

If a defendant does not voluntarily pay a judgment, the plaintiff must find assets that belong to the defendant and collect them. This process may be easy for some defendants if they have well-known assets or if details about their bank accounts were shared in discovery. But for others, plaintiffs may need to hire an investigator or use public records (like property records or vehicle registrations) to find assets.

Relief

The most straightforward thing that people can seek in a lawsuit is money. If you allege in a lawsuit that a defendant caused you to lose a certain amount of money, or failed to live up to a promise to pay you a certain amount of money, you can seek a judgment that directs the defendant to pay you that money.

Defaults

If a defendant does not respond before the deadline, then the plaintiff can ask the court to award it a default judgment. A default judgment is (in most ways) the equivalent of a judgment that a plaintiff would have gotten if it had proved its claims at a trial.