Category: Attorney & Consumer Trust

Contingency fees let a client hire a lawyer without paying anything upfront. The fee itself is a percentage of whatever the case recovers, not an hourly bill. Most states have adopted some version of Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.5(c), which controls what that percentage can look like and requires clear disclosure. The rule demands…

The single most important document in this recovery process is not a credit card statement or a verbal complaint. It is the FTC Identity Theft Report, generated at IdentityTheft.gov. Almost nothing below works until your identity is stolen and that report actually exists. The FTC’s own recovery guide spells out what the report unlocks: blocking…

A debt collector calling about a five-year-old credit card balance is not necessarily bluffing. But the calendar matters more than most assume, because every state sets its own statute of limitations on debt. Once that period runs out, a creditor can no longer enforce a debt too old to collect in court. The underlying bill…

Most people who are sued over a debt never contest the case at all. Pew Charitable Trusts’ 2020 study of debt collection lawsuits looked at the jurisdictions where usable data existed — New York City, Colorado, and Washington. In those jurisdictions, courts resolved more than 70 percent of debt collection lawsuits with a default judgment…

When a debt collector calls about a debt that isn’t yours, federal law gives you a specific tool: a written dispute, sent within 30 days of the collector’s validation notice, that forces the collector to stop until it verifies the debt. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act requires every third-party collector to send that notice,…