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A default Judgment occurs when a party fails to answer a lawsuit, or fails to appear at a hearing. There are steps that can be taken immediately after a default judgment is granted to seek a new trial or to undo the judgment. IF YOU HAVE HAD A DEFAULT JUDGMENT GRANTED AGAINST YOU, CALL AN ATTORNEY NOW! The procedures are very technical.

Default judgments can occur in any type of civil case. This counts for injury cases and divorces.

A default judgment is much like a forfeit in a sporting event. A default judgment presumes all parties are aware of the event, but that one party does not show up. The court (like a referee) declares the party who showed up the winner. In many default judgments, the party who shows up can get almost anything they have asked for granted to them.

There are requirements before a court can grant a default judgment. The court must be convinced that the other party was aware of the case and the hearing. Depending where you are in the process, this can mean that you can show good service of a petition (the document that starts the lawsuit) on the defendant and the passage of the required time to answer. If there was an answer, you have to be able to prove to the court the other side had actual notice of the hearing (such as a returned, signed green card on a certified letter. the notice had to be received by the other party before the deadline required for giving notice of that type of hearing. State and local rules may apply to what time period is required on certain types of hearings.

If you can show the court that the other person actually knew of the court date, that the other side had the required amount of time or more to respond or appear, and if your court papers are in proper form, the judge can enter a default judgment in your favor. For the judge to do this, you usually need to have an order pre-prepared for the hearing with what you are seeking out of the hearing stated in the order. If you are seeking matters not originally plead for in the previous filings, the court may not grant what you seek (after all, that would mean the judge was granting matters the other side wouldn't be aware of since you had never filed that with the court or the other side before).

Just because you get a default judgment doesn't mean the case is over. Once the required amount of time has passed, if the other side has done nothing about the judgment, then the default judgment is final. A final judgment from a default order is just as enforceable as any other order.