Arbitration awards in credit card cases - I've beat them

I've had some cases now in which a client was being sued by a debt collector in an action to confirm an arbitration award for a credit card debt. The clients came to me for the first time after the arbitration award had already been awarded against them. To say that the chips were down in these cases is an understatement, yet I succeeded in getting the cases dismissed.

Each of these cases involved an arbitration award from the National Arbitration Forum (NAF).

One of these cases involved an arbitration award of over $64,000 and was less than a month away from trial when I got hired. I set the case for a hearing on a plea to the jurisdiction and got the case dismissed. Even though the debt collectors had an arbitration award, they could not prove with admissible evidence that they were the owners of the debt. Without evidence that they owned the debt, they did not have standing to bring a court action and the court did not have subject matter jurisdiction to hear the case.

The debt collector had about four affidavits and about 50 pages of evidence. Every single page of evidence was inadmissible.

We snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.