Hayt, Hayt & Landau Make them produce an assignment. miami, Florida

I still don't know what this firm is and we dealt with them for about a year (2008-2009). I checked the Bar numbers of the various attorneys and all were members of the bar but I'm not a lawyer and beat them easily in court. So they're not good lawyers.

In any collection action there has to be someone who is owed the money. This is your creditor. Your creditor can sell your debt to anyone who wants to buy it and try to collect. This is called an assignment. If someone says you owe them money because they purchased your debt from your creditor, demand to see the assignment.

Hayt/Landau could never produce one and although we actually went to trial, including their appeal of our first summary judgment, they were never able to show to whom we owed the legitimate debt. We kept our argument simple. Who do we owe this money to? And we kept repeating that same theme throughout the trial process. Why they couldn't come up with a legitimate assignment for a legitimate debt does not have a legitimate answer. The only reason they couldn't come up with the assignment as far as I'm concerned is that they never had access to it.

This could mean that they were trying to collect money from us owed to another creditor; a double rip off. It could mean that they were so incompetent that they couldn't defeat a rank amateur in court. It could be any number of reasons. But the bottom line is that our legitimate debt of some $5-6,000 went away thanks to their insistance in prosecuting us.

This should be rule one in any debt collecting action. Find out who you really owe and make them prove it.