Sued By Sierra Managed Asset Plan, LLC? Here's Help.
You have about 30 days from the day you were served to file a written response, and that's usually enough time.
Miss that deadline and Sierra can take a default judgment against you. Respond, and Sierra has to prove it actually owns the debt, which is harder than it sounds. Here's how, and how I can help.
Sierra Managed Asset Plan, LLC is a small debt buyer that purchased charged-off credit card accounts, including Citibank accounts, and sued Californians on them, mostly in the years around 2013 to 2016. It isn't a name that shows up on many new lawsuits, so if Sierra is in your life today, odds are it's through an older case or an old judgment. Old collection paper has its own pressure points, and it deserves a careful look before you pay anyone.
The paper problem
A defended collection case usually comes down to proof, and the first thing a debt buyer must prove is that it owns your account. That is harder than it sounds. Debt buyers purchase defaulted accounts by the portfolio, on spreadsheets, sometimes through more than one intermediate owner. The specific assignment of your account is often missing or defective — and without it, they cannot prove they own the debt.
California adds its own teeth here. A debt buyer suing in this state has to possess and plead specific documentation about your account, including the complete chain of title, meaning every company that has owned your account since the original creditor (the Fair Debt Buying Practices Act, Civil Code section 1788.50 and following). Those requirements are not self-executing, though. Somebody has to know what buttons to press and switches to flip. The whole industry is, in my view, a square peg being forced into a round hole. The square peg is the bulk collection business these companies want to run through the courts. The round hole is a court system built to decide cases one at a time, under rules of evidence, with rights on your side of the table. In a defended case, that square peg tends to get stuck.
I know this company firsthand. I represented the consumer in Sierra Managed Asset Plan v. Hale, a published appellate decision from 2015. Sierra had won a judgment of a little over ten thousand dollars using account records that its witness couldn't actually vouch for. The witness had simply received the records from the prior creditor, and had no personal knowledge of how they were prepared. The Appellate Division held that wasn't good enough under the Evidence Code, and the judgment was reversed. Past results can't promise anything about your case. What Hale shows is narrower and more practical. The records these companies rely on are not self-proving, and making them prove up their paper is a real defense, not a technicality.
And if part of you hesitates to fight because the debt was real once, look at what actually happened. Sierra Managed Asset Plan bought your account, or claims to have bought it, for next to nothing, on a bet that nobody would make it prove anything. In my view, a company running that bet has no special claim on your guilt. You didn't choose this course. They did. Make them prove it.
Use the thirty days
From the day you're served, you generally have thirty days to file a written response with the court. If nothing gets filed, Sierra can ask for an automatic judgment against you (called a default judgment), and with a judgment they can levy your bank account, meaning they take the money directly, garnish your wages if you have a job, or put a lien on your house. Responding is what makes everything above matter, because a defended case is where the proof gets tested.
Two reads that will help. Here's how to calculate your deadline, which is more particular than people expect. And the top five mistakes people make when they get sued is five minutes well spent before you decide anything.
Let it be my problem
If you'd rather hand this off, the consultation is free, it takes fifteen minutes, and you speak with me directly. No intake screener, no telemarketer. Although the outcome can't be guaranteed, you can offload the process, so you know that whatever can be done is being done while you go about the other things in your life. It's sort of like the alarm clock by your bed. Once it's set, your brain stops holding the time, because that's taken care of. Let me take care of this.