Seventh Circuit Pulls Back Standing for Failure to Note Credit Dispute

In 2022, in Ewing v. Med-1 Solutions, LLC, the Seventh Circuit held that a consumer is harmed by a credit report’s failure to note that a given debt is dispute–finding that it impacted the consumer’s creditworthiness and impacted their reputation, and thus that a consumer has standing to pursue a claim based on a debt collector’s failure to report debt as disputed. Last week, though, the Seventh Circuit suggested Ewing should be read narrowly and does not support the “proposition that every delay in reporting a dispute, however short, causes actual injury.” In Thomas v. LVNV Funding, the court held that a debt collector’s 29-day failure to report a dispute to a credit agency was not an injury itself, and the plaintiff was required to produce evidence of injury, such as evidence “that a single natural person saw her credit file during the critical 29-day window,” or that “any issues she may have encountered in obtaining credit were caused by the lack of a dispute notice.”  Under these two cases, it is unclear just how many days delay is sufficient to show de facto harm in the Seventh Circuit.