That helps too.

No telling the judge and your lawyer both went to Southern Law and graduated at the same time and are best friends.

All jokes aside, in some cases a lawyer can find one of those technicalities that could end up getting a case dismissed.

Case in point, let’s say you get sued over an unpaid debt and a document is missing or was not turned over as evidence. That could make the plaintiffs case not be valid and a judge could choose to dismiss it over just that fact.

Since most debts are sold to collection agencies, they may just buy a spreadsheet and one or two sheets of paper or PDFs of the debt. They are expecting that the debtor ignores the suit and they get a default judgment.

But there are many defenses a defendant can file to stop the easy process to a default judgment.

One is was the debt out of statute of limitations.

Ownership of the debt, they may not have the required documentation to sue. Just last year a debt collector was ordered to pay 24 million dollars in fines and restitution over just that.

Also, disagreements between the customer and the debt are argued based on the contract with the original creditor, some of those agreements include arbitration clauses where the debt case could move to an arbitration venue and cost the debt collector more to collect than to settle for less.

Sometimes debt collectors violate the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act such as contracting you at the wrong time or misrepresenting something in a communication to you. So that means you could counter sue in federal court and collect up 1,000 dollars per incident.

In most cases a defendant can file these arguments pro se without legal representation since sometimes legal defense will greatly increase the cost to settle the matter, but larger debt like over 5-10k it may make sense to have legal representation and/or begin the steps to filing bankruptcy with an attorney who gets paid first in some cases.