The equivalent NY Rule, 22 NYCRR 130-1.1 can be read here:
It does allow for financial sanctions above actual costs and attorneys fees. Sanctions shall not exceed $10,000 for a single instance of frivolous conduct.
What gets me in this case is that the law firm clearly has procedures in place for identifying the relevant parties, and used those procedures in this case, and yet when those procedures should have made clear that they had the wrong guy, they went ahead anyway.
When they called the guy, they learned:
a) they had the right name (first name and last name)
b) he had never held a Sears-Citi credit card
c) the last two digits of his SSN did not match those of the law firm’s target
d) his year of birth did not match that of the law firm’s target
What’s the point of calling someone, and asking them all those questions, if you’re going to completely ignore the answer and proceed with the case anyway?
I’m sure that some people who actually are the real targets might lie, but it seems to me that all of this means that the phone contact serves no purpose whatsoever.
It was probably a glitch in the process. The thing about the firms that do this is that they only do collections. The process is pretty automated and for lack of a better term, canned. If someone down the line screws up, then the case gets filed since no one is probably really checking. For them it truly is a numbers game. The attorney in court probably has never really seen the file prior to setting foot in the court. Generally these guys are sitting in front of the court room with a stack of files, and are doing 20 or so of them at a time for the initial hearing. The files are prepared by a paralegal who probably does a bunch at a time.
It wouldn’t surprise me that something slipped through the cracks like that.
You might be right.
Personally, i think that the financial or other sanctions against the law firm in such cases should be sufficiently high to discourage the production line approach to practicing law. Hit these assholes with a $10K penalty every time they drag an innocent person before a judge without doing the proper checks, and they would soon improve their system.
I like that $10K penalty too. This firm wasn’t quite malicious, I don’t think, but they certainly were extremely careless. Perhaps if they got stung a few times, they’d actually make sure that they were going after the right people.
I’m sure that there are many debt collectors who only want what’s rightfully theirs. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of collectors who harass innocent people who don’t have any overdue debts.