Forster and Garbus is a law firm that specializes in debt collection law. They have been practicing since 1970 and are located in Farmingdale, New York. The partners in the firm are Ronald Forster and Mark Garbus. They claim that they work with people to settle their debt for financial freedom. According to their website the firm discloses that they are “required under federal law to advise you that we are a debt collectors and any information we obtain will be used in attempting to collect this debt.” Forster and Garbus were one of the first New York law firms to use an automated legal collection system to handle and simplify collections.

Clients of American Legal Process

In addition to this automated service to help with collections, Forster and Garbus is also a client of American Legal Process (ALP). They use their services to summon debtors to court. ALP notifies New York consumers of lawsuits, summons or complaints facing them. Some have criticized this process, saying that it was not handled properly and they never received a court summons. Many of these summonses have been found buried in yards or inside city sewers giving them the name “sewer service” implying that they were not distributed properly or illegally obtained. Since many consumers were unaware of their court summons, they did not appear in court, causing judgments to be held against them without their knowledge. This lead to harassing debt collection phone calls and in some cases frozen bank accounts.

Lawsuits

In April 2009, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sued ALP citing fraudulent business practices and violating the Debt Collection Practices Act. This act makes it unlawful to use deceptive techniques to collect a debt. As a result, thousands of New Yorkers have been defaulting on accounts, facing judgments and destroyed credit scores. MFY Legal Services, a non-profit company, found in a report that Forster and Garbus served over 30,000 consumer summons to the New York City Civil Court in 2007. This was the catalyst for Cuomo to file suit against the law firm claiming that as clients of ALP they were not properly monitoring ALP as their legal processing service and should have been paying closer attention. For their part Garbus and Forster defend themselves saying they should not be held responsible for the actions of ALP. They plan to vigorously fight the lawsuit against them.