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Quick analysis: Summer Vacations? July Lawsuits Down

It looks like lots of consumers went to the beach instead of the courthouse last month. All three of the main statutes were down: FDCPA (-10.3%), TCPA (-27.8%) and FCRA (-13.3%), though FCRA maintains its status as the only major consumer statute growing year-over-year with a +6.5 growth rate YTD over 2020.

CFPB complaints against debt collectors did grow in July over June… but only by +3.5%, contributing to an alarming +38.2% growth rate over 2020 YTD.

In other news, putative class actions represented 20.2% of FDCPA, 56.2% of TCPA and 4.6% of FCRA lawsuits filed last month. About 45% of all plaintiffs who filed suit last month had filed at least once before (that is the highest percentage we ever recall seeing, btw). And finally, Florida attorney Thomas John Patti from the Law Office of Jibrael S. Hindi took the top spot for representing the most consumers in June (56) while Georgia attorney Matthew Thomas Berry kept the title of the most active consumer attorney of the year with 165 consumers represented so far in 2021.

Current Month: Previous Month: Previous
Year:		 Year to Date: Year to
Date Comp:
Jul 01, 2021
Jul 31, 2021		 Jun 01, 2021
Jun 30, 2021		 Jul 01, 2020
Jul 31, 2020		 Jan 01, 2021
Jul 31, 2021		 Jan 01, 2020
Jul 31, 2020
CFPB  6845 6613 3.5% 4858 40.9% 41691 30175 38.2%
FDCPA  559 623 -10.3% 631 -11.4% 3906 4284 -8.8%
FCRA  436 503 -13.3% 437 -0.2% 3201 3006 6.5%
TCPA  130 180 -27.8% 236 -44.9% 1157 2347 -50.7%

 

Complaint Statistics:

6845 consumers filed CFPB complaints, and about 962 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from Jul 01, 2021 to Jul 31, 2021.

  • 6845 CFPB Complaints
  • 559 FDCPA, 113 Class Action (20.2%)
  • 130 TCPA, 73 Class Action (56.2%)
  • 436 FCRA, 20 Class Action (4.6%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 962 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 432, or (45%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 2737 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 147 different US District Court branches.
  • About 636 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 64 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 58 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 57 Lawsuits: Florida Southern District Court – Fort Lauderdale
  • 52 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 47 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles
  • 46 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 43 Lawsuits: Texas Northern District Court – Dallas
  • 31 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 28 Lawsuits: Florida Southern District Court – Miami
  • 23 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Central Islip

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 56 Consumers: THOMAS JOHN PATTI
  • Representing 50 Consumers: JIBRAEL JARALLAH SAID HINDI
  • Representing 34 Consumers: TODD M FRIEDMAN
  • Representing 27 Consumers: JONATHAN ALEXANDER HEEPS
  • Representing 27 Consumers: ADRIAN ROBERT BACON
  • Representing 27 Consumers: ALEJANDRO EMMANUEL FIGUEROA
  • Representing 25 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 19 Consumers: DAVID J PHILIPPS
  • Representing 17 Consumers: MATTHEW P FORSBERG
  • Representing 15 Consumers: MARY ELIZABETH PHILIPPS

Statistics Year to Date:
7441 total lawsuits for 2021, including:

  • 3906 FDCPA
  • 3201 FCRA
  • 1157 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2021: 6955 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 165 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 146 Consumers: TODD M FRIEDMAN
  • Representing 127 Consumers: DAVID M BARSHAY
  • Representing 119 Consumers: ADRIAN ROBERT BACON
  • Representing 117 Consumers: ALEJANDRO EMMANUEL FIGUEROA
  • Representing 102 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 102 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 98 Consumers: YOSEF STEINMETZ
  • Representing 93 Consumers: DAVID J PHILIPPS
  • Representing 93 Consumers: THOMAS JOHN PATTI

——————————————————————————————————-
CFPB Complaint Statistics:

There were 6845 complaints filed against debt collectors from Jul 01, 2021 to Jul 31, 2021.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 881

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 2098 Credit card debt (31%)
  • 1640 I do not know (24%)
  • 1561 Other debt (23%)
  • 916 Medical debt (13%)
  • 278 Auto debt (4%)
  • 166 Payday loan debt (2%)
  • 76 Mortgage debt (1%)
  • 63 Federal student loan debt (1%)
  • 47 Private student loan debt (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 3947 Attempts to collect debt not owed (58%)
  • 1618 Written notification about debt (24%)
  • 455 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (7%)
  • 405 False statements or representation (6%)
  • 334 Communication tactics (5%)
  • 86 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (1%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 1747 Debt is not yours (26%)
  • 1609 Debt was result of identity theft (24%)
  • 1177 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (17%)
  • 473 Debt was paid (7%)
  • 405 Didnt receive notice of right to dispute (6%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 812 Complaints: CA
  • 808 Complaints: TX
  • 688 Complaints: GA
  • 676 Complaints: FL
  • 372 Complaints: NY
  • 287 Complaints: SC
  • 263 Complaints: OH
  • 243 Complaints: PA
  • 232 Complaints: NC
  • 185 Complaints: MD

The status of the month’s complaints are as follows:

  • 5401 Closed with explanation (79%)
  • 759 In progress (11%)
  • 546 Closed with non-monetary relief (8%)
  • 122 Untimely response (2%)
  • 17 Closed with monetary relief (0%)

This includes 6657 (97%) timely responses to complaints, and 188 (3%) untimely responses.

WebRecon LLC is a part of the Americloud Holdings LLC family of companies. (855) WEB-RECON

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API Access


We offer two powerful APIs to businesses that communicate with consumers:

  • The primary Litigious Consumer Scrub uses a combination of name, geography (and optionally SSN) to identify consumers who have filed lawsuits in the past.
  • The Litigious Consumer Phone Scrub pulls every phone number from our proprietary database of litigants and runs your phones against ours.

These APIs allow you to check your data against our database on the fly. Clients love using this to handle risk management without missing a beat in their daily workflow.

Workers Comp Scrub


Workers Comp-inspired FDCPA lawsuits are growing aggressively, particularly in Florida. Only WebRecon can tell you who in your database may have a Florida Worker’s Comp case filed that could trigger litigation against you.

You can’t stop 100% of all lawsuits, but if you collect medical in Florida and you don’t have a process in place to show the court that you have a way to check every file against the Workers Comp database, then you have lost the case before it even begins.

Knock these suits out of the park with the Workers Comp Scrub.

Our Monthly Client Newsletter with The Litigant Hotsheet


Anyone can get our guest newsletter, but only clients get the version with the Litigant Hotsheet –  identifying the most active consumer Plaintiffs filing suit in jurisdictions around the country each month. Grab a coffee, shut your door and open your database to make sure you are doing all you can to stay safe.

Individual Vendor Consumer Complaint Search


Just like Vendor Monitoring, but without the monitoring. Search any business’s history of consumer complaints (Litigation, CFPB, BBB, State AG) with the click of a button! Great for on-the-fly gut checks of the companies you do business with.

Vendor Monitoring


Through vicarious liability, you can be held accountable for the bad behavior of your vendors. If they abuse consumers, for all intents and purposes, so do you. This is a big freakin’ deal!

But fear not, friend. WebRecon can track consumer litigation, CFPB, BBB and State AG Office complaints against the companies you do business with.

When a new complaint of any kind is filed against any of the companies you are monitoring, we’ll automatically push a report out to you with all of the publicly available details so you can react accordingly and if necessary, protect your interests.

The Litigious Consumer Phone Scrub


Would you knowingly dial a number attached to a consumer with a history of litigation? Of course not.

But thousands of companies do just that, every single day. If you’d like to know who they are, simply review the court dockets. They are the ones getting sued the most.

Sure, you can stop dialing consumers. But your marketing and operations teams might not be too excited about that plan.

Another idea? Identify the consumers most likely to sue you, based on previous litigation histories, and just don’t call them.

Identify high-risk phones quickly & easily, before you expose yourself to unnecessary risk.

Litigation Context Search


This is really cool.

Our primary search engine is really designed to search for parties to litigation. Need to know more about a consumer plaintiff? That’s easy. Defendant? Check. Lawyer? No problem.

But if you need to find all 1099C lawsuits filed in July 2020… not so much.

Which is why we developed the Context Search. We have pulled out and indexed the full text from over 140k consumer lawsuits and made them available to you in a search engine, with more than 1000 new lawsuits added each month. Use it to search the text of filed litigation so you can easily identify those hard-to-define trends and cases worth following.

Individual Search Engine


Instantly and easily search our proprietary database for any lawsuit participant – Plaintiff, Defendant or Attorney.

In the results, we’ll show you the full consumer litigation history of any participant, including the “docket data” (who, what, why, where, when) and – in many cases – we can even provide a copy of their actual filed lawsuits.

You can also search by phone, date range, federal/state, class action, court, statute, etc. We offer a ton of flexibility to get you the exact search result you are looking for.

The Litigant Alert Ongoing Monitoring Process


Just like our one-time batch process, but without the whole “one time” thing.

When one of your consumers files new litigation against anyone in the future, you should be the first to know. Our monitoring service can make that happen.

WebRecon can monitor your entire database (or any segment of it) for future instances of consumer litigation filed by the very consumers you are working with, right now!

It is simple to add new consumers to the watchlist, remove inactive accounts, download full reports, etc.

Best of all, we only charge you for the volume of your monitoring database – not the frequency of the searches. Search daily, weekly, every Tuesday and Friday, the 15th of each month, whatever – it is totally up to you! You won’t pay a penny more.

The Litigant Alert One-Time Batch Process


This is our flagship service. Find out why hundreds of companies won’t contact any consumers before running them through WebRecon’s Litigant Alert.

This process identifies consumers with a history of litigation quickly & easily. If they have ever filed lawsuits under FDCPA, TCPA, FCRA or similar statutes, you’ll find out here. 

WebRecon’s proprietary database is simply the most comprehensive collection of dangerous consumer litigation data in existence. 

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