How Lawsuits are Started to Recover Money Damages for being falsely accused of selling counterfeit products.
A seller was falsely accused of selling counterfeit products. They have decided they’re not going to take this anymore and they’re going to sue. How does a lawsuit begin?
The first thing you have to do is file a summons and complaint.
The summons outlines the case and it shows it’s summonsing an individual to appear before a certain court that’s chosen. The complaint itself outlines the facts, the causes of action, and the damages sought from whatever disputes stemmed the lawsuit.
There’s a lot of complaints about the United States system of justice that anybody can file a lawsuit and in a way, that is true. But as a seller who has been falsely accused of selling counterfeit products, you have a right to have your case heard in court and there’s no gatekeeper.
Every seller who’s been falsely accused of selling counterfeit products can take that complaint and bring it to any federal courthouse in the country (or even your local state court) and sue whoever made that false complaint against you.
All you need to do is have a lawyer and pay the filing fee and that’s how litigation begins. Now, once you follow the case, the papers have to be given to the other side in a particular fashion.
Service of Process: the court’s way of ensuring that you’ve actually received the summons and complaint.
It wouldn’t be fair to hold you liable if you weren’t aware there was a court case in the first place. Process Service is the insurance that this individual is aware of the dispute and knows where to appear and when to appear for the court case.
The way we accomplish service of process is through professional process servers or through various courts’ electronic methods. The federal courts have become very electronic. Many state courts are still kind of old school where you have to hire a process server who has to go in and physically hand the papers.
Wherever you are, there’s a mechanism in place where you follow the lawsuit, you pay the court fee, then you have to get those papers to the person who made the complaint.
Service of Process can also be accomplished by what’s called Substituted Service, which is when you go to the court and say, your honor, we can’t serve this person. We don’t know where they are. Can you order a different way of serving them?
So, what are some of the different ways that the court can order service of process when you don’t actually know who or where the defendant is? Oftentimes, they contact the Amazon seller directly. It could be a message that you received from Amazon indicating that you’ve been served in subject to a lawsuit.
It provides the contact information to the attorney and the individual plaintiff. This way you know who to contact. They can also send it to your email directly, which has been found to be sufficient. And if all else fails, they can serve a public notice, which has a link to the summons/complaint. They just have to take efforts to make sure this information goes public.
To sue a person/company, you don’t need to know who they are or even where they are. There are methods of serving papers to them, and again, they don’t actually have to receive the papers, you just have to satisfy the law of service of process.
If you’d like to learn more about how to sue people/companies who have made false complaints of you selling counterfeit products, give us a call for a free consultation 1-877-9-SELLER.
We will talk you through the entire system and then you can make an educated decision whether you want to see substantial damages from people/companies that have asserted baseless counterfeit complaints against you.