On June 25, 2021, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court held that the individual members of a class "must demonstrate, among other things, that they suffered a concrete harm" in order to have Article III standing to recover individual damages in a class action. [1]
In TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, --- S. Ct. ----, 2021 WL 2599472 (2021), a certified class of over 8,000 people alleged TransUnion LLC ("TransUnion") violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act ("FCRA") by failing to use reasonable procedures to ensure the accuracy of its credit files. [2] The allegations arose after TransUnion ...
On June 23, 2021, the Supreme Court of the United States (“Supreme Court”) ruled that the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (“FHFA”) must be removable and that the tenure protections put in place by the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act are unconstitutional. Specifically, the Supreme Court’s decision in Collins v. Yellen holds that the “for cause” removal provisions infringed on the President’s constitutional authority to remove the head of an agency with a single director.
However, the Supreme Court did not find grounds to set aside any of the ...
On June 14, 2021, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a one-line order stating that the Court was withholding issuance of the mandate in Hunstein v. Preferred Collection and Management Services, Inc. The appeals court’s April 21, 2021, published ruling in Hunstein sent shockwaves through the collection industry when it held that debt collectors who share information about consumers’ debts with collection vendors can violate provisions in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA”) aimed at protecting consumer privacy.
The withholding of the mandate was ...
In its 2016 decision in Avila v. Riexinger & Associates, LLC, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that an attempt to collect a debt that states the current balance owed but does not disclose whether interest and fees are accruing is misleading in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA”) Section 1692e. This decision created a cottage industry of lawsuits seeking to pounce on this seemingly technical violation in many businesses’ collection notices.
Recently, however, the Second Circuit has recognized exceptions to the Avila decision, most recently ...