Earlier this month, Justice Gorsuch’s opinion in Henson v. Santander Consumer USA, Inc. served as a reminder that courts should refrain from reading absent terms into clear and unambiguous statutory language. On June 22, the Second Circuit followed this directive…
New Jersey’s federal district court has provided a measure of comfort under circumstances that will be familiar to most debt collectors. In Gebhardt v. LJ Ross Assocs., the plaintiff’s attorney sent the defendant a certified letter stating that the plaintiff…
In his debut opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for a unanimous United States Supreme Court, holding that banks and financial companies that purchase and collect defaulted debt are not “debt collectors” under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. At…
It is rare for an enforcement action against debt collectors to go to a contested trial, and a jury verdict is even rarer. On June 7, 2017, a Harris County, Texas jury awarded over $25 million in in civil penalties…
A divided Supreme Court has ruled in Midland Funding, LLC v. Johnson that filing a time-barred proof of claim in bankruptcy does not violate the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The opinion by Justice Breyer was joined by four conservative…
Last month, the CFPB published its annual report on the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1692, et seq. As with its former reports, the CFPB included a section about consumer complaints. In his introduction to the report,…
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued its annual report to Congress on the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. As always, this report mixed a healthy dose of natural, self-congratulatory rhetoric with significant insights to the state of the industry and…
On April 6, 2017, the California Supreme Court invalidated a contractual arbitration provision on the basis that California state law prohibits enforcement of arbitration agreements that would bar claims for public injunctive relief. Its decision – California’s latest in a…
Foreclosure attorneys struggle to find an appropriate way to comply with the FDCPA’s requirement that a validation notice correctly state the amount of the debt in cases in which the balance is changing constantly due to a variety of factors. …
The FDCPA forbids communicating with a consumer “if the debt collector knows the consumer is represented by an attorney with respect to such debt and has knowledge of, or can readily ascertain, such attorney’s name and address, unless the attorney…