It’s been a while since we have seen one of these … A District Court judge in Alabama has dismissed a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act case for lack of standing because the plaintiff did not suffer a concrete injury after the defendant was accused of disclosing her information to a third party when it engaged a vendor to print and mail a collection letter. That’s right, it’s a Hunstein case, albeit with what appears to be a slight wrinkle.
The Background: A ruling in this case was stayed pending the outcome of Hunstein v. Preferred Collection & Management Services, in which the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ultimately ruled that plaintiff did not allege a concrete harm when he accused the defendant of disclosing his personal information to a third party by hiring a vendor to print and mail collection letters and thus did not have standing to sue.
- Much the same as the plaintiff in Hunstein, the plaintiff in this case also alleged a technical statutory violation of the FDCPA and did not allege anything else. That left Judge Madeline Hughes Haikala with no choice but to dismiss the case for lack of standing.
- The wrinkle in this case was that the plaintiff appeared to be asking the judge to compel arbitration in the case, perhaps as a last-ditch effort to obtain a settlement. But without standing, Judge Haikala’s only option was to dismiss the case, she said in her ruling.
- For those who might not have been around, Hunstein was a case in which the Eleventh Circuit initially ruled that disclosing information to a print and mail vendor constituted a violation of the FDCPA, which led to more than a thousand lawsuits being filed against collection operations. The Eleventh Circuit ultimately reversed itself in an en banc ruling, saying the plaintiff lacked standing to sue because he did not suffer a concrete injury.
