Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly Reviews Recent Hinshaw Debt Buyer Victory at the Supreme Judicial Court

On April 26, 2018, the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly provided an in-depth review of Hinshaw's recent victory in Dorrian v. LVNV Funding LLC. Titled "Dorrian and the calm after the storm," the article invokes scenes from the film "The Perfect Storm" to analogize what was potentially at stake for the $13.7 billion passive debt buyer industry.

As described in this Hinshaw case description, the case pitted consumer lawyers against the debt-buying industry, on the question of whether a passive debt-buying business must be licensed as a debt collector in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. After a trial judge ruled in 2017 that LVNV was operating as a debt collector without a license, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court vacated the trial judge's ruling, holding that passive debt buyers such as LVNV are not considered "debt collectors" under the licensing statute.

Author Jeffrey A. Schreiber concludes that Hinshaw's victory helped the consumer lending industry "avoid catastrophe" and allayed the "perfect storm into which debt buyers [had] unwittingly sailed."

Read "Dorrian and the calm after the storm" (subscription required)

A version of this article was previously published by inside Arm.