Do I Have To Hire A Lawyer To Credit Repair My Credit Reports?

Do I Have To Hire A Lawyer To Credit Repair My Credit Reports?

credit repairNo — you can do your own “credit repair” without a lawyer.

You are entitled to hire a lawyer but not obligated to do so — the process for fixing your credit reports is relatively easy.

There is a lot of abuse and scams out there in the “credit repair” world that you need to be very skeptical about anyone who promises to “fix your credit” — especially if they are charging you money to fix your credit.

We’ve gone over how to fix your credit report errors so I’ll only briefly summarize this now:

  • Pull your credit reports
  • Review them to see if errors
  • If there are errors, dispute them to the credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion)
  • If the errors are not fixed, either dispute again or get a consumer lawyer in your state to sue the credit reporting agencies and/or the furnisher of false information (i.e. Capital One, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc) in federal court under the FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act).

Credit repair companies say they will dispute items for you — for a fee.

There are so many scams that Congress passed a law regulating this practice but you can still get swindled.

Companies will dispute through the credit reporting agencies debts that you know you owe.

This makes no sense — the point of your credit reports is to be 100% accurate — not to trick someone into deleting accurate information.

You can do any disputes you want on your own — talk with a lawyer if you wish to make sure you are disputing correctly — but I would not pay any lawyer to do a dispute.

Now, if you sue — you will be paying a lawyer but normally this is done on a “contigency” fee basis where the lawyer only gets paid if you recover money damages.

But to pay a lawfirm — where a lawyer won’t even look at it — to send out dispute letters to Equifax?

That’s a waste of money and we have found that the lawyers that do these “mass bogus disputes” do the following:

  • They accomplish nothing;
  • They take your money; and
  • They destroy your credibility so that if you have a legitimate case, we won’t take your case because of the way the disputes were done.

Give us a call at 205-879-2447 if you have questions.

But only call us if you live in Alabama — we get calls daily from all over the country but we can only represent consumers in Alabama.

Or you are welcome to fill out our online contact form and we will get right back with you.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

-John G. Watts

For further research

| Share

Leave a Comment