Remember when Hunstein came out and I made a big deal of it on TCPAWorld and told everyone that even dialing platforms might trip the Eleventh Circuit’s odd and expansive reading of the FDCPA?
Well at least one dialing platform–LiveVox–listened. They submitted a great brief this week urging the Eleventh Circuit to reconsider the Hunstein ruling–arguing that the “textualist” court actually misapplied the rules of statutory construction. (Now THAT will get some attention.) Nice work.
The brief can be found here.
And for those of you still wondering how Hunstein impacts your outreach efforts, here’s what LiveVox says on the matter:
If the panel’s decision stands, and its logic extends not only to dunning vendors but to all outsourced vendors, collection agencies will have to develop their own internal technology—an impractical endeavor—to manage the accounts placed by their creditor clients in order to communicate effectively with consumers. Collection agencies are not IT professionals.
The ability of a collection agency to develop its own sophisticated software solution that would sufficiently ensure the applicable consumer protections under the FDCPA is remote at best. LiveVox has a significant stake in ensuring that the FDCPA is interpreted in way that provides its collection agency customers with a clear method for fulfilling their statutory obligations in a compliant and consumer-centric manner. The panel decision creates industry confusion.
In other words LiveVox sees Hunstein as a direct threat to dialer platforms that support the debt collection community. Tough to disagree.
As the complaints continue to pour in we’ll keep an eye on these developments. Always happy to chat.