If this were a National League baseball game, we’d be using the phrase “double switch.” But, alas, it’s not. So I hope I explain this correctly. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has overturned a lower court’s Judgment as a Matter of Law ruling after a District Court judge reversed a jury award in the amount of $61,000 in a case in which the defendant was accused of violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Texas Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by not marking an account as disputed.
A copy of the non-precedential ruling in the case of Jones v. Portfolio Recovery Associates can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff, upon realizing she had a low credit score, began working with attorneys to repair her debt. The attorneys sent dispute letters to the companies the plaintiff did not recognize on her credit report, including the defendant. But instead of marking the case as disputed in its records, the defendant marked the account with a “cease and desist” notation. The defendant never marked the account as disputed. The plaintiff filed suit, at which point the defendant stopped reporting the debt altogether.
The case proceeded to trial, at which point a jury awarded the plaintiff $1,000 for the FDCPA violation and $60,000 for the TDFCPA violation. But the defendant filed a motion for a Judgment as a Matter of Law, arguing that the plaintiff did not prove that the debt in question was a consumer debt. A District Court judge granted the motion and overturned the verdict in favor of the defendant. The plaintiff appealed.
The plaintiff had two credit cards, one branded from QVC and one branded from HSN. PRA had two accounts in the plaintiff’s name. The HSN card was from Comenity Bank. The other account did not have a merchant’s name associated with it, but the inference was it was the QVC card.
The defendant tried to make a number of arguments that the jury was wrong to make such an inference, which the District Court agreed with, but the Appeals Court ruled “a court may only disrupt a jury’s credibility determination if the testimony was incredible as a matter of law — meaning that the testimony could not possibly be true.”
A failure on the part of the plaintiff to “explicitly connect the dots” that the second account was definitely for consumer purposes is not enough to overturn the jury’s verdict, the Appeals Court ruled.
