A District Court judge has partially granted a defendant’s motion for summary judgment in a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act case and dismissed the complaint because the plaintiff lacked standing to sue, but gave the plaintiff — who raised new issues of why he has standing at the wrong time — an opportunity to file an amended complaint to cure those deficiencies. An interesting wrinkle is that the judge initially ruled the plaintiff had standing to sue even though she denied class certification, but subsequent rulings on standing led the judge to reconsider her position.
A copy of the ruling in the case of McDonough v. Leopold & Associates and Trinity Financial Services can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff filed suit after receiving a collection letter, claiming the statute of limitations had expired along with other deficiencies. Before she could get to the deficiencies, Judge Christy Criswell Wiegand of the District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, revisited the issue of whether the plaintiff suffered a concrete injury in order to have standing to file suit in federal court. After initially ruling that being deprived of accurate information in the collection letter was sufficient to allege an injury-in-fact, Judge Wiegand looked at other rulings that have come out from within the Third Circuit, and changed her position. “… other courts have recently held that the type of informational harm that Mr. McDonough alleges is insufficient for standing purposes,” Judge Wiegand wrote.
The plaintiff did raise new theories of harm to support standing during the summary judgment stage — alleging he suffered from increased stress, stopped his plans to sell his house, had marital troubles, and made modifications to his house that he would not have otherwise made — but Judge Wiegand was prohibited from considering them at this stage of the proceedings. She did give the plaintiff a chance to file an amended complaint to address the deficiencies related to standing.
