Harassed Consumers Fight Back Against Sleazy Bill Collectors; Suits Skyrocket As Growing Army Of 'Contingency Fee' FDCPA Lawyers Target Industry

In Minneapolis, Missesota, the Star Tribune reports:

• Minneapolis attorney Pete Barry points expectantly at the video screen, drawing the attention of the 16 attorneys in the hotel conference room who've come to learn his trade secrets.
• On the screen, a debt collector with spiky hair is squirming, his eyes darting back and forth as Barry barrages him with questions. "You see!" Barry yells triumphantly. "He's lying. Collectors often lie. If it's between me and him in front of a jury, I'll win every day."
• Hounded by collection firms that buy unpaid debts and relentlessly pursue debtors through court judgments, many of Barry's clients have turned to him for relief from what they contend is nothing short of harassment.
• Yet the legal movement Barry helped create -- by training hundreds of lawyers at grueling, 30-hour boot camps that cost $2,500 per head -- has begun to look more and more like the collections industry he despises. Federal lawsuits by debtors against collectors have soared sevenfold over the past decade, in a mirror image of the huge jump in collections judgments that Barry and others accuse debt collectors of churning out mill-style without regard to accuracy.
• And while collectors usually win judgments when they go to court, debtors are finding success when they fight back. Debtors win so easily, in fact, that about a third of those who sue do it again, according to WebRecon, a Michigan firm that tracks the litigation.
• High-volume consumer law firms are churning out lawsuits as efficiently as the collectors they battle. Many of these suits are cookie-cutter complaints that are skimpy on details -- just like many collection actions clogging the nation's court systems.
• Some debtors, armed with scripts and recorders given to them by attorneys, have goaded collectors into making abusive comments that violate the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, or FDCPA. At least 80 people have sued creditors more than 10 times under the law. On message boards and blogs, debtors brag of gaming a system that is otherwise stacked in favor of lenders.

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• Barry and his client were awarded $275,000 in a legal settlement [in one egregious case]. That's just one of more than 2,000 such cases he has pressed in the past decade. Barry declined to disclose his income, but he works on a contingency basis, meaning he doesn't collect attorneys' fees unless he wins.

For more (a must-read for those looking to slam sleazy collectors), see Debtors in court -- suing collectors (Pete Barry, a Minneapolis attorney, has flown all over the country conducting boot camps for lawyers, teaching them how to sue debt collectors under the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA)).

Go here for more on Barry's law firm, Barry & Slade, LLC (We Sue Abusive Debt Collectors™).