Alexa Rosenbloom of Harvard has written The Pervasive and Troubling use of Coverage Attorneys in Assembly-Line Litigation, 33 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol’y (2026) (forthcoming). Here’s the abstract:
Debt collection cases dominate state court civil dockets in Massachusetts and across the country. Extant scholarship regarding debt collection in the courts has focused on what makes it easy for creditors to churn out this “assembly line litigation,” including repeat plaintiffs and passive courts. Some minimal light has also been shed on creditors’ counsel in these cases, highlighting how debt collection “mills” dominate dockets and rely on non-lawyer staff. However, it is not the handful of attorneys at collection firms that appear for the average court appearance on a debt collection cases. Instead, debt collection mills hire substitute attorneys, also known as coverage attorneys or appearance attorneys, to make the bulk of their appearances in court. The pervasive use of such attorneys is a practice largely unique to collection cases and, along with non-lawyer staff at collection firms, is the engine that runs assembly line debt collection litigation in Massachusetts and across much of the country. The Article relies on information gleaned through interviews with industry actors to shed light on the coverage attorney system. It posits that there are multiple ethical problems with the use of coverage attorneys and that their use compromises the rules of professional responsibility. In conclusion, the Article argues for reform and better enforcement of existing rules to rein in the untethered use of coverage attorneys.
