Rebecca Coleman, Director of the Credit Abuse Project (CAPP) and a 2010 Open Society Institute Baltimore County fellow has contributed to the Open Society Institute Audacious Ideas blog.  Her article, entitled "Make Creditors Prove They are Entitled to Collect a Debt" can be viewed here.  Audacious Ideas is a blog that was created to stimulate ideas and discussion about solutions to difficult problems in Baltimore.

CJ Member Peter Holland has published an article titled “The One Hundred Billion Dollar Problem in Small Claims Court: Robo-Signing and Lack of Proof in Debt Buyer Cases.”  Below is the abstract.  ABSTRACT Recent years have seen the rise of a new industry which has clogged the dockets of small claims courts throughout the country. It is known as the "debt buyer" industry. Members of this $100 billion per year industry exist for no reason other than to purchase consumer debt which others have already deemed uncollectable, and then try to succeed in collecting where others have failed. Debt buyers pay pennies on the dollar for this charged off debt, and then seek to collect, through hundreds of thousands of lawsuits, the full face value of the debt. The emergence and vitality of this industry presents several legal, ethical and economic issues which merit exploration, study and scholarly debate.

This article focuses on the problem of robo-signing and the lack of proof in debt buyer cases. Although this...

   On June 27, 2011, Civil Justice submitted to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) its comments regarding the OCC’s proposed regulatory amendments in response to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  The Act was created to address serious problems with how consumers are protected from fraudulent or otherwise unethical behavior on the part of lenders, including mortgage companies.  Chief among these problems is the OCC’s 2004 regulation implementing the National Bank Act, which prevented a great number of state laws that protected consumers from abusive lending practices from being enforced against national banks.  This preemption of state law enabled national banks to engage in predatory and reckless lending practices and played a direct and significant role in causing the current financial crisis.      Unfortunately, the proposed regulations do not solve this problem, but rather amount to more of the same.  For example, while the Act specifically restricts the OCC’s...

HBO will be airing an important documentary film about tort reform and its threat to the civil justice system called “Hot Coffee” on Monday, June 27, 2011 at 9pm.  The documentary follows four people, including the infamous McDonald’s Hot coffee lawsuit plaintiff Stella Liebeck, whose lives have been affected by their inability to access the courts, and how caps on damages hurt them.  The film also examines the role of corporations and a complicit media in promoting tort reform.  “Hot Coffee” was a selection of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.  Watch a trailer of the documentary here, and for a review of the movie, click here.

On Friday, May 20, 2011, Civil Justice held the first attorney training in its new Creditor Abuse Prevention Project (CAPP). Over 30 attorneys attended the full-day training to learn more about bringing creditor abuse claims in Chapter 13 bankruptcy cases.  Attorneys were given the option of taking the training for free if they agreed to take pro bono cases as part of CAPP. The morning session of the training focused on three main areas of creditor abuse in bankruptcy. Laura Margulies, of Laura Margulies & Associates (http://www.law-margulies.com), explained the process for filing proofs of claim in bankruptcy and identified common problems that arise in the claims filed by creditors. She also presented sample objections based on common creditor abuses. Professor Peter Holland of the University of Maryland School of Law Consumer Protection Clinic (http://www.law.umaryland.edu), briefly discussed common debt collection violations...

Last month on behalf of a Maryland consumer facing foreclosure, Civil Justice filed an affirmative counterclaim concerning the modification and foreclosure practices of her servicer and purported owner of her loan.  This case, Bolling v. American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc., et al.,  presents an issue of first impression in Maryland (and maybe nationwide) that goes to the heart of the current housing crisis.  As many people now know, many of the loans subject to foreclosure for the last four years were pooled together into investment trusts by Wall Street professionals as another way to make profits with little or no risks.  These pools of loans are sometimes referred to as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) which the SEC defines as “debt obligations that represent claims to the cash flows from pools of mortgage loans, most commonly on residential property. Mortgage loans are purchased from banks, mortgage companies, and other originators...

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