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John Rossman, chair of Moss & Barnett's creditors' remedies and bankruptcy team, was quoted in the insideARM article, "Experts React to FDCPA Court Decision on Emailed Validation Notice" (written by Tim Bauer, Oct. 9, 2017). Excerpts from that article appear below.

Last week insideARM wrote about a court decision that addressed the issue of sending a validation notice via email. (Lavallee v. Med-1 Solutions, LLC (Case No. 1-15-cv-1922, U.S.D.C., Southern District of Indiana). In that article, we suggested that this case was a very important and timely decision as the potential for ARM industry use of email to communicate with consumers is gaining momentum.

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insideARM asked several industry experts for their thoughts on the case and the court’s decision. Here are some of the responses:

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John Rossman, Attorney at Law, Moss & Barnett. P.A.

"The Court in this case focused on the fact that there were several steps involved for the consumer to access the validation notice sent via email -- if anything, the Court found that the debt collector's security precautions were too robust and perhaps unnecessary. According to the Court, the prevalence of email scams make it unlikely for a consumer to 'click' on a link from a previously unknown sender. Common sense and consumer expectations dictate that if a consumer provides an email address to a creditor, that alone should be sufficient for a debt collector to email a validation notice to the consumer, with the subject line of the email referencing the creditor and information required by 1692g contained in the body of the email."