The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals may now have to decide where it stands on the ATDS issue. On May 20, 2020, Judge Lee Yeakel of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas issued an opinion in Suttles v. Facebook, Inc., Case No. 1:18-cv-01004 (W.D. Tex. May 20, 2020), where he concluded that a dialing system is not an Automatic Telephone Dialing System (“ATDS”) under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) if it does not produce numbers. A copy of the opinion can be read here.
Three circuit courts have previously held that the definition of an ATDS ...
In March 2020, the United States Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (“CARES Act”) to provide financial relief to individuals and organizations impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic. As a part of the CARES Act, Congress created the Paycheck Protection Program (“PPP”) which authorized the Small Business Administration (“SBA”) to provide loans to small businesses. Historically, however, the SBA has rendered certain types of business ineligible to receive SBA loans. Recognizing this, Congress established merely two criteria for ...
A payday lender recently filed suit against the Small Business Administration (“SBA”) in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia relating to its Paycheck Protection Program (“PPP”) loan application under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (“CARES Act”). See Payday Loan, LLC v. United States Small Business Administration, Civil Action No. 1:20-cv-1084 (D.D.C. Apr. 25, 2020) The lender operated twenty-two stores in California that provided lending, check-cashing, money orders, money transmission, and other financial ...
On April 30, 2020, the Supreme Court of Mississippi entered two Orders denying relief for certain individuals that have been impacted by the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic (“COVID-19”) reasoning lack of constitutional authority. Particularly and in an effort to provide relief to renters struggling to pay rent during the pandemic, the Mississippi Center for Justice filed a petition asking the Court to extend the moratorium on evictions and late rental fees until at least July 27, 2020.[1] The Motion asked the Court to both “(1) impose a temporary moratorium on all judicial ...
A .pdf copy of the Medley opinion can be found here.
While the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has been clear that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) allows a consumer to revoke consent through “any reasonable means,” federal courts have been grappling with the interplay of consent that was provided in a bargained-for contract and subsequent attempts to revoke that consent. Back in 2017, the Second Circuit issued a landmark decision in Reyes v. Lincoln Auto. Fin. Svcs., 861 F.3d 51, 56 (2d Cir. 2017), holding that “the TCPA does not permit a party ...
On April 29, 2020, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued an interpretive rule allowing certain consumers to modify to waive certain waiting periods required under the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA). Per the CFPB, this interpretive rule is intended to ease the way for consumers with urgent financial needs to obtain access to mortgage credit more quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ordinarily, the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) Rule imposes certain disclosure requirements and waiting periods ...