On January 15, the Federal Communications Commission defended its controversial July 10, 2015 Order (the “Order”) expansively interpreting the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) in a 110-page brief filed in ACA International et al. v. FCC et al., where several consolidated challenges to the Order by businesses and trade groups are being heard in
On January 11, in Club Texting, Inc.’s Petition for a Declaratory Ruling, the Federal Communications Commission issued an Order that has the potential of increasing the scope of senders who can be liable for unwanted text messages under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”). In the process, the FCC doubled-down on its controversial July
On December 11, 2015, the United States Department of Justice filed an intervenor’s brief in support of the constitutionality of the “emergency calls exception” in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”), a federal statute regulating the usage of automatic telephone dialer systems. The issue embroils the government in a consumer dispute with Facebook, which is
Last Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would heighten the standards for obtaining class certification by requiring extra scrutiny as to the continuity of the damages claimed by the class representative and the putative class members. Lawmakers voted 211-188 to pass H.R. 1927, the Fairness in Class Action Litigation and
On January 7, the Federal Trade Commission announced four new enforcement actions targeting debt collectors and continuing the FTC’s nationwide crackdown of illegal debt collection tactics. The cases are part of Operation Collection Protection, a coordinated federal-state enforcement initiative targeting deceptive and abusive debt collection practices. Over the past year, 130 actions have been brought
On December 16, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a consent order with EZCORP, Inc., ordering the small-dollar lender and its wholly-owned subsidiaries to refund $7.5 million to 93,000 consumers and pay $3 million in penalties for illegal debt collection practices.
EZCORP, a financial services company headquartered in Austin, Texas, provides high-cost, short-term, unsecured loans,
The Supreme Court’s latest arbitration decision is but the latest in a long line of decisions enforcing the strong federal policy enforcing arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. In DirecTV v. Imburgia, a 6-3 decision, Justice Breyer held that the Federal Arbitration Act preempts state laws, in this instance California’s, that invalidate arbitration clauses if
We have previously reported on ACA International’s appeal from the Federal Communications Commission’s July 2015 Order interpreting the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (“TCPA”) in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, including the joint brief recently filed by petitioners on November 25.
In addition to that joint brief,
On December 11, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving Ohio’s “special counsel” law under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA”), 15 U.S.C. § 1692-1692p, a case that is likely to have much wider implications involving the standard for determining whether a debt-collection method is “false, deceptive, or misleading.”
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not showing any signs of slowing down its recent string of enforcement actions. On December 7, the CFPB filed a complaint against and proposed a consent order with a debt collection company that will require the company to pay at least $2.5 million to settle claims that it