by Jeff Sovern A couple of weeks ago, Ira Rheingold and I had an op-ed in the Times about issues with credit reports. Almost on cue, the Associated Press reports Jury awards Oregon woman $18.6M over credit report. It seems she had been trying to get Equifax to correct errors for two years. In the op-ed, […]
Category Archives: Consumer Litigation
by Jeff Sovern Here (behind paywall). Excerpt: Court decisions tied to the 1968 law fell 18% year over year during a12-month period that ended May 31, to 1,037, data from the National ConsumerLaw Center shows. That number is down 38% from the peak two years earlier. The pace of new litigation is also slowing. […]
An 11-judge en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument this week in Kilgore v. Keybank, an important consumer arbitration case. Kilgore presents the question whether the Federal Arbitration Act and the Supreme Court's decision in AT&T v. Concepcion require courts to enforce arbitration clauses even when they would block consumers from pursuing […]
Next month, David Vladeck will a leave the helm of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection–by all accounts reinvograted under his dynamic leadership–to go back to Georgetown Law. Jeff Gelles, the Philadelphia Inquirer's consumer columnist, attempts to sum up David's tenure in a piece entitled "Consumer chief leaves FTC a feistier place." A snippet: Speaking […]
Next Wednesday (November 21), at noon, I'll be presenting a free webinar focusing on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's amicus program from both consumer and industry perspectives. On the industry side, I'll be joined by Alan Kaplinsky and Christopher Willis of Ballard Spahr's Consumer Financial Services Group. We'll discuss the factors likely to influence the […]
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Sorrell v. IMS Health, there’s been a lot of speculation about the extent to which previously accepted commercial speech regulation may now be subject to “heightened” or strict scrutiny under the First Amendment. Sensing an opportunity, lawyers who regularly represent consumer reporting agencies invoked […]
by Jeff Sovern Burrell v. DFS Services, LLC, 753 F.Supp.2d 438 (D.N.J. 2010) is a couple years old now but we haven't blogged about it before and the problem it describes has not been fixed so it still merits atttention. Burrell was victimized by an identity thief and complained about it to the creditors rather […]
Judith L. Fox of Notre Dame has written How Forum Determines Substance in Judicial Debt Collection, 31 Banking and Financial Services Rev. 11 (August 2012). Here's the abstract: In an email to the Small Claims Task Force, a committee appointed by the Indiana Supreme Court to investigate allegations of abuse in the Marion County Small […]