N
need-help
Guest
What is the name of your state?Florida
OK. Try to make this short and sweet. We started a company, arranged for advertising and decided after several months it was not working. I dropped the ball and failed to make approprate contact with newspaper for adjusting the contract. Just got swamped with business and family obligations and business was still in red. When we'd finally get to correrspondence from this paper it was several weeks following submission to us. End result: the paper took us to their attny for collections sometime after June 2003. I contacted the attny and was told we were to pay approx $3500.00 for a $1300.00 bill. I requested information regarding why the bill had been increased and stated the amout we owed. He said the paper gave him the amount and if I disagreed I'd have to send him the copies of the bills. I sent him this information and heard nothing until we received a summons to appear for a pretrial conference. The summons is dated 10-28-03 as the time it was served. We paid our account to the paper in full on 10-24-03. Having misplaced the attny information I sent the payment directly to the paper. I called the paper to make sure they received the payment after we recieved the summons and asked about the court date and whether we still needed to appear as we had paid the account. The person in accounts receivable dept (who's name I did not get) said he has our payment and no we did not need to go. So I foolishly believed he knew what he was talking about. We then received a letter dated 11-13-03 from said attny stating they were in receipt of payment but that a balance was due for 2126.39 and a settlement offer was made for approximatley half if we would respond before the pretrial conference on 11-18-03. We received the letter on 12-4-03 and sent a letter via FAX to his office stating we had just received the letter and no phone messages to our office or certified letters had been issued regarding this very important deadline they had set. I again asked him to respond with information as to why our bill had been ncreased to $3500.00. Again no response until we get a Final Judgement Based on Default. Nothing has been sent to us regarding this default judgement except that it occurred on June 11th and the final on June 23, 2004.
So my questions are: what can we do about getting our questions answered about why the bill went to $3500. Must we pay the attnys fees which originated after Nov 18, 2003 and were we supposed to be notified about this entry of a final judgement? Can we do anything on our own without hiring an attny (which we do not have the $$ for) to let someone know that we feel we have been left in the dark on these issues? O are we bound to remit the amount in the fianl judgement? Thanks.
OK. Try to make this short and sweet. We started a company, arranged for advertising and decided after several months it was not working. I dropped the ball and failed to make approprate contact with newspaper for adjusting the contract. Just got swamped with business and family obligations and business was still in red. When we'd finally get to correrspondence from this paper it was several weeks following submission to us. End result: the paper took us to their attny for collections sometime after June 2003. I contacted the attny and was told we were to pay approx $3500.00 for a $1300.00 bill. I requested information regarding why the bill had been increased and stated the amout we owed. He said the paper gave him the amount and if I disagreed I'd have to send him the copies of the bills. I sent him this information and heard nothing until we received a summons to appear for a pretrial conference. The summons is dated 10-28-03 as the time it was served. We paid our account to the paper in full on 10-24-03. Having misplaced the attny information I sent the payment directly to the paper. I called the paper to make sure they received the payment after we recieved the summons and asked about the court date and whether we still needed to appear as we had paid the account. The person in accounts receivable dept (who's name I did not get) said he has our payment and no we did not need to go. So I foolishly believed he knew what he was talking about. We then received a letter dated 11-13-03 from said attny stating they were in receipt of payment but that a balance was due for 2126.39 and a settlement offer was made for approximatley half if we would respond before the pretrial conference on 11-18-03. We received the letter on 12-4-03 and sent a letter via FAX to his office stating we had just received the letter and no phone messages to our office or certified letters had been issued regarding this very important deadline they had set. I again asked him to respond with information as to why our bill had been ncreased to $3500.00. Again no response until we get a Final Judgement Based on Default. Nothing has been sent to us regarding this default judgement except that it occurred on June 11th and the final on June 23, 2004.
So my questions are: what can we do about getting our questions answered about why the bill went to $3500. Must we pay the attnys fees which originated after Nov 18, 2003 and were we supposed to be notified about this entry of a final judgement? Can we do anything on our own without hiring an attny (which we do not have the $$ for) to let someone know that we feel we have been left in the dark on these issues? O are we bound to remit the amount in the fianl judgement? Thanks.