00-2780, 00-2781 Nielsen v. Dickerson, et al.

Listen to this article

“Whatever Dickerson may have done, he had no such involvement with the file of any debtor slated to receive his form letter and played no meaningful role in the decision to send a debtor such a letter.

Dickerson made no independent, professional assessment of the delinquency and validity of any debt, he did not select the debtors to whom a letter would be sent, and he did not make any assessment as to whether a debt was a candidate for legal action. He ‘reviewed’printouts of the debtor information supplied by Household, but only in the sense of literally looking at the data and checking for errors. He removed certain debtors from the recipient list, but not based on any individualized assessment of a debtor’s delinquency or other pertinent circumstances; he and his firm simply identified debtors who had declared bankruptcy, had already received a letter from him, or who lived in ‘prohibited’ states-a screening process little different from the checks that Household and Contact U.S.A. themselves performed. Moreover, contrary to the impression his letter would have given the unsophisticated debtor, Dickerson had not been engaged and was not prepared to take legal action in pursuit of the debt: he had no authority to negotiate a payment plan, settle, or otherwise dispose of any debt; he did not handle debtor responses to his letter beyond categorizing and forwarding them to Household; and he was never asked to and did not take legal action to collect on any debt.”

Affirmed.

Appeals from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Kocoras, J., Rovner, J.