The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court decision granting summary judgment in favor of a trio of defendants who were being sued by a plaintiff because she alleged the dispute notification on her validation letter was too small to read.
The ruling from the appeals court in the case of Jewsevskyj v. Financial Recovery Services, LVNV Funding, Resurgent Capital Services, and Alegis Group, can be accessed here.
Not including a copy of the letter, the Appeals Court ruling indicated that the letter was typed in all uppercase letters, using Times New Roman style, and in 8-point font. The plaintiff argued that, to the least sophisticated consumer, the contents of the letter, specifically the validation notice, was “not sufficiently prominent or readable to satisfy the statutory notice requirements” of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
The District Court ruled in favor of the defendants, concluding that the contents of the validation notice were not overshadowed by other aspects of the letter and was sufficiently prominent.
To comply with Section 1692(g) of the FDCPA, debt collectors must notify individuals of their right to dispute a debt, and must do so in a matter that the notice is “conveyed effectively” to the individual. Whether the notice is conveyed effectively, the notice is evaluated from the perspective of the “least sophisticated consumer.”
Citing Graziano v. Harrison and Wilson v. Quadramed Corp., other rulings from the Third Circuit, the baseline for determining the effectiveness of a validation notice is:
Though the debtor is expected to read the collection letter, reviewing the validation notice must not be a struggle: instead, it “must be in print sufficiently large to be read, and must be sufficiently prominent to be noticed” by the least sophisticated debtor. Moreover, “the notice must not be overshadowed or contradicted by accompanying messages from the debt collector.” A communication overshadows the validation notice when other language and/or physical characteristics of the letter feature more prominently than does the notice. A communication contradicts the validation notice when it provides information inconsistent with the consumer’s right to dispute the debt. “[W]hether language in a collection letter contradicts or overshadows the validation notice is a question of law.”
In this case, the judges ruled that nothing overshadowed the validation notice and there was nothing contradictory in its message.
There is no language that contradicts the notice and the recipient’s right to obtain information about the debt. Moreover, because the notice language is in the same font and format as the rest of the letter, there is nothing more prominent than the notice.
While font size and format could render a notice unreadable, we cannot conclude that the notice here fits in that category as it is concise and legible, and is not misleading, confusing, or overshadowed by anything else in the letter.
