2020 Collections-Related Case Law Year in Review

The end of the year is my favorite — it’s the perfect time to review what’s happened in the courts over the past twelve months. While 2020 might have been a wild ride in many other areas, it’s been a good year for case law favoring the debt collection industry.

Since January 1, 2020, we’ve added a whopping 634 cases into the CLT. Of those cases, a majority came down positive for the debt collection industry! Below is the breakdown of the overall dispositions:

Positive: 361 (57%)
Mixed: 84 (13%)
Negative: 179 (28%)
Neutral: 10 (2%)

There were many substantive issues that dominated the court dockets this year, including:

Credit reporting dispute procedures (41 cases: 25 positive, 12 negative, and 4 somewhere in between)
Letter formatting/overshadowing (27 cases: 17 positive, 3 negative, and 7 somewhere in between)
Time-barred debt (25 cases: 13 positive, 8 negative, 4 somewhere in between)
Creditor ID (25 cases: 14 positive, 6 negative, 2 somewhere in between)

There’s one issue that gets a shout-out for starting to cause a scene on the dockets, and that’s payment processing fees—sometimes called “pay to pay” fees. We began to see more court decisions on this issue, and the results are all over the place. Of the 9 court decisions in the CLT, 5 are positive, 3 are negative, and 1 is mixed.

The entire insideARM team is going to be out on vacation for two weeks starting next week, so we’ll see you all on the flip side in 2021 (except for a brief interlude when Part 2 of the CFPB's final rule is released).