Sued For Balance On Apartment During Early Pandemic In La

Year is 2019, my wife is pregnant with my son at the time, everything in LA was shut down at the time, and my hours were drastically reduced, leaving us unable to afford our apartment. We spoke with a family friend lawyer about our options, as the initial 1 year lease was up and we renewed for another 6 months. He said that if we paid that months rent already and vacated the property with enough time for them to flip it for a new tenant, then they could not do anything about it due to the COVID protocols that were in place at the time.

A few weeks later they let us know we owed a balance of $8000 or so due to “early termination of the lease” and our family friend advised us not to pay it.

Here we are, 6 years later, receiving a call that we are going to be served, unless we want to settle now.

All in all, is this worth fighting at all? Or is it in best interest to fork over that amount of money?? I mean, we disclosed to them that we could no longer afford living there due to the pandemic and vacated almost 2 days later (about a week into the month in which we had paid rent for).

Any advice would be sincerely appreciated!