Photo of Tim J. St. George

Tim defends institutions nationwide facing class actions and individual lawsuits. He has particular experience litigating consumer class actions, including industry-leading expertise in cases arising under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and its state law counterparts, as well as litigation arising from data breaches.

The Senate’s latest banking bill primarily focuses on overturning large chunks of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Somewhat unexpectedly, on March 8, the Senate’s Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee approved the addition of two bipartisan proposals that provide help to some of the nation’s forty-four million student loan borrowers to

State in the House: Bill Passed Committee, but Vote Not Scheduled

Introduced by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act cleared the Committee on Education and the Workforce of the United States House of Representatives on December 13, 2017. It did so despite claims by Democrats—and

On March 9, the Ninth Circuit affirmed dismissal of a putative FACTA class action on Article III standing grounds, citing the requirement of a “concrete injury” reinforced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Spokeo v. Robins. In Noble et al. v. Nevada Checker Cab Corp. et al., No. 16-16573, the court

Two major groups within the financial industry began the month of March with renewed advocacy for structural modifications to the student loan program managed by the U.S. Department of Education, which currently issues about 90% of student loans. 

First, in early March, the Consumer Bankers Association, a trade organization representing financial

On February 21, the United States Department of Education, led by Secretary Elisabeth Dee DeVos, issued a memorandum indicating it was considering stepping into the debate over the standard used to determine whether a student loan can be discharged under the Bankruptcy Code.  The request for public comment appears aimed in part at revisiting allowing

DirecTV was on the receiving end of a proposed class action in the Central District of California earlier this week alleging the direct broadcast satellite service provider violates the Fair Credit Reporting Act and California state law by pulling credit reports on consumers without a permissible purpose.  A copy of the complaint is available here

A district court in Maryland has ruled that a debt collection agency did not violate the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1692 (“FDCPA”)’s mini-Miranda requirement by failing to disclose its identity in a call initiated by the plaintiff in response to a debt collection letter.

Background

Consumer plaintiff Rhonda Price-Richardson defaulted on

In a new article detailing its Stats for December 2017 and Year in Review, WebRecon presented data showing a slight decrease in the number of consumer litigation lawsuits filed in 2017 compared to other years. We previously reported on WebRecon’s consumer litigation statistics for May of 2017, where we found the number of new

As we previously reported, Mick Mulvaney, acting interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced a change to the CFPB’s governing philosophy to focus on quantitative analysis to guide the Bureau’s future regulatory and enforcement actions. As an example of this new emphasis on hard data, Mulvaney pointed to the fact that almost

On February 12, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued a precedential opinion in which it found that a debt collector’s inclusion of the word “settlement” in a collection letter for a statutorily time-barred debt suggested to the least sophisticated debtor the debt was still legally enforceable could therefore constitute potential violation of the Fair