01-1809 Boyd v. Wexler

Listen to this article

“[P]retrial discovery revealed that in a recent eight-and-a- half-month period Wexler’s firm sent out 439,606 pieces of mail, which according to the deposition testimony of one of the firm’s lawyers consisted overwhelmingly of collection letters. That is an average of 51,718 a month. So Wexler’s firm must be large-but no, it turns out to have only three lawyers, although it has 45 other employees. … To say the least, it is difficult to see how the firm could send … that number of letters yet still have a lawyer review the file and the letter in every one.”

“We need not determine in this case the minimum amount of lawyer review required to avoid misleading the debtor into thinking that a lawyer has made a responsible professional judgment about the existence of a legally enforceable debt. … In an age of specialization, professionals are not to be criticized for identifying subroutines that paraprofessionals can adequately perform under a professional’s supervision. But Wexler does not argue that he has delegated some of the review tasks (for example, ascertaining whether the amount of the claim submitted by the client is the same as the amount that appears on the form letter prepared by the nonlawyer collection agents whom Wexler employs) to nonlawyers; he argues that he performs all these tasks himself, implying that if he is not telling the truth, no one performs them… [A] rational jury might find, given the volume of mail, that it was unlikely that Wexler had actually reviewed the plaintiffs’ files before authorizing dunning letters to be sent to them.”

Reversed.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Castillo, J., Posner, J.