On May 31, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a $150,000 sanctions award against three consumer attorneys and their law firms for bad faith conduct and misrepresentations.
The opinion reads like a detective story and lays out, in the Court’s own words, “a mosaic of half-truths, inconsistencies, mischaracterizations, exaggerations, omissions, evasions, and failures to…
Many employers use background checks when evaluating potential candidates for hire. They do this for a variety of reasons, from basic due diligence to a desire to avoid negligent hiring claims in the future. If an employer intends to use this employment background check – often referred to as a consumer report – to take …
On May 29, the Ninth Circuit ruled that an end-user’s misuse of reported information does not render a credit reporting agency’s report inaccurate for purposes of liability under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The Court affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment in the putative class action case brought against a national credit …
On March 31, 2018 the United States crossed a milestone. As of that date, Americans’ student loan debt topped $1.5 trillion, exceeding the share of consumer debt held by auto loans ($1.1 trillion) and credit cards ($988 billion), and jumping by more than $521 billion in roughly six years.
A report released in May…
On May 15, an en banc panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision finding the statute of limitations for an alleged violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act begins on the date the violation occurs, not on the date the debtor discovers the violation. The ruling adds to the growing…
In a recent decision denying plaintiffs Aldean Isaac’s and Julissa Ortiz’s motion for summary judgment, a federal district court judge in the Eastern District of New York found that defendant NRA Group, LLC’s collection letter that included the same amount of debt twice and then a payment slip for the sum of these duplicate amounts…
As disclosed in a notification filed on May 3, in FMS Investment Corp. v. United States (“the Notice”), the Department of Education (“DOE”) will soon stop using private debt collectors to handle overdue student loan payments.
In this post-award bid protest filed on February 9, 2018, in the United States…
Even before it succeeded in finally quashing a civil investigative demand (“CID”) issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on April 21, 2017, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (“ACICS”) notched a second victory against a federal adversary in April 2018.
Background
Established in 1912, upon the request of Benjamin Franklin Williams, President…
On Wednesday, May 23, from 3 – 4 pm ET, Troutman Sanders attorneys, Alan Wingfield, Wendy Sugg, and Meagan Mihalko presented a webinar discussing employment-purpose background screening laws. The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act imposes technical paperwork requirements on employers desiring to obtain background screenings, and many millions of dollars have been paid in individual …
On May 14, the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (“PAPSA”), a federal law that prohibited most states from allowing sports-related gambling. The ruling now clears the way for any state to legalize gambling on sports.
PAPSA made it “unlawful” for a state to “authorize” any gambling operation based on…
