by Jeff Sovern Here, in Bloomberg. I'm afraid I didn't find it persuasive. He didn't respond to our argument that state courts often fail to discipline attorneys who violate ethical rules in debt collection matters, as well as other points we made.
Category Archives: Debt Collection
by Jeff Sovern That's the title of my essay my colleague Gina Calabrese and I wrote here in Bloomberg Law. Excerpt: The ABA argues that consumers don’t need protection from unscrupulous lawyers because lawyers are already subject to state ethics rules largely written by the ABA itself. Experience tells us otherwise. When a law firm sued […]
WaPo has the story here. The government is also considering other debt collection initiatives, as noted in the article.
by Jeff Sovern The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act provides consumers a variety of protections. Collectors, for example, are barred from making false statements and engaging in unfair practices, and are obliged to give consumers certain disclosures. But the American Bar Association wants to excuse lawyers "engaged in litigation activities" from complying with the […]
by Jeff Sovern A number of sources have reported on a survey of more than one thousand metastatic breast cancer patients presented recently at an American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) symposium that found that debt collectors had contacted about half about cancer care bills. HCP said that 49% had heard from debt collectors while AccountRecovery.net put […]
Today, the Center for Responsible Lending released a new report examining the repayment experiences of borrowers of longer-term payday loans in Colorado. The report is based on focus groups that were conducted in four Colorado cities in September 2017. The full report is worth the read, but here are the key takeaways: In many cases, […]
by Jeff Sovern We just posted to SSRN the draft of our article, Validation and Verification Vignettes: More Results from an Empirical Study of Consumer Understanding of Debt Collection Validation Notices, Forthcoming in the Rutgers U. L. Rev. (with Kate Walton & Nathan Frishberg). Comments welcome! Here's the abstract: The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act obliges debt […]
The issue is whether the FDCPA applies to non-judicial foreclosure proceedings. The case is Obduskey v. McCarthy & Holthus LLP. More from SCOTUSBlog here.
by Jeff Sovern Here, against Security Group, Inc. As expected, the case involves debt collection problems but the Bureau also found FCRA issues. Here's an interesting thing about the case: remember how Mulvaney suggested that enforcement actions ought to be based on the numbers of complaints received? Well, I ran the three names in the CFPB's […]
by Jeff Sovern The NY Times has the story here. Excerpt: The director, Andrew M. Smith, has recently represented Facebook, Uber and Equifax — all companies with matters before the commission — and plans to recuse himself from dozens of cases now that he has been confirmed for the post. And in 2012, Mr. Smith was also […]