Handed keys back in 1990, got County Court form today for Shortfall, help?

Facts: We lived in a first floor flat in Ilford, had £55000 mortgage with Abbey Nat. in 1988. Due to my son being born disabled and Oxygen dependent in 1990, we had to move to a Ground floor House/ Flat. Unfortunately due to the negative Equity situation we found ourselves in we agreed to hand our keys back to the AN. We expected to hear something from them but we got absolutely nothing until Eversheds contacted us by letter in 1999 stating that we owed AN a shortfall of £28000 after they sold our old flat in 1994. They then contacted me by phone at my place of work demanding the money, I explained we were not in any position to pay the money; their phone calls became twice weekly ones offering a reduction each time. I then found this site and contacted a solicitor who was recommended for free advise, she advised me that they should have informed us of the Court order for Repossession before selling our old flat and as they didn’t do so then they could take me to court and just let them try to explain this fact away to the Judge. They said fine we will take you to court but we heard no more. Then approx three months ago we started to receive letters to our current house ( we have moved 4 times since the AN flat- three within the same Redbridge Borough and now to Tendring) demanding payments. We ignored all their letters, until today ( 22/04/04) when we received a County Court Claim form from Cardiff stating that Eversheds were pursuing a shortfall of £28,346.92 pence for AN My questions are: 1. What solicitor do you recommend to deal with this? Have tried ringing all the help tel. no. on this site and ALL of them have answer phones on. 2. What can I do now, for ourselves, bearing in mind that we have only got 28 days to respond to the "Acknowledgement of service form" and considering the claim form was stamped 7th April?

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