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 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...