Originally Posted by
rjburns
United has to send someone to court. Hopefully, you can find a small town with friendly judges somewhere incredibly inconvenient for United to get to. Not much to lose except a filing fee and some service costs. Get a Monday morning court date so the United lawyer has to burn his Sunday traveling.
Typically in a situation like that they will just engage a local lawyer to handle it (who BTW will also be more familiar with the local procedures than either a UA in-house lawyer from Chicago or a pro se plaintiff, and use that to UA's advantage).
Also, they don't HAVE to send someone to court. If the amount in question is small enough and it assesses its chance of success is small, UA will do the math, and might decide not show at all and risk a default judgment.