Posts Tagged ‘law’

Brad Perri, a bankruptcy attorney in Minnesota, will be joining us as a guest editor for the next two weeks
Bankruptcy is kind of the granddaddy of all consumer protection laws, but we don’t talk about it enough here, since none of the regular editors are bankruptcy lawyers.
Before bankruptcy, debtors had to work off their debt [...]

5 Legal Tips for Peace of Mind | Zen Habits

Most People Can Still File Chapter 7 bankruptcies | Bankruptcy and Consumer Information

“The thrust of the law is to require mortgage servicers to exhaust all avenues in order to contact borrowers and negotiate modified terms before foreclosing. It also provides limited protections for tenants affected by landlords’ foreclosures and imposes duties on foreclosing servicers to maintain properties.” California Foreclosure Law Passed | Consumer Law & Policy

Press release from Americans for Fairness in Lending. Full release after the jump (it is not yet up on AFFIL’s website, so I cannot link to it).

While we are on the subject of keeping track of your credit score, as a result of a bunch of class action lawsuits against TransUnion, virtually anyone who has had a credit card since 1987 can select from several settlement options, including up to nine months of enhanced credit monitoring.
First, the settlement applies to “[a]ll [...]

Hundreds of brokers netted in FBI sweep Arrests include two former Bear fund execs charged with fraud | MSNBC

Can governments copyright laws? Should they? | BoingBoing

In response to the tanking housing market, Minnesota passed some pretty strong mortgage industry regulation last year. Alex Stenback points to an article in the Strib reporting that there are now less than half as many mortgage originators as last year. And 50 mortgage brokers surrendered their licenses, as well.
More than 50 Minnesota mortgage brokers [...]

The Minnesota legislature put the Subprime Borrower Relief Act on Governor Pawlenty’s desk last week. The Act would have put Minnesota home foreclosures on hold for a year to give homeowners a chance to sell, refinance, or negotiate a workout plan with their lenders.
It was, in all respects, a reasonable and fair compromise that would [...]

Monster Cable is—forgive me—a monstrous company. It preys on small companies and any company with the name “monster” in its title, regardless whether a consumer would be likely to confuse Monster Cable’s unnecessarily-expensive cables with, say, a show about cars or vintage clothing.
Monster Cable seems to have sued as many companies as it has distributors [...]

The proposed bills would work together to address the deepening foreclosure crisis in Minnesota. From the StarTribune:

One would prod homeowners facing foreclosure to get help, even forwarding their phone numbers to foreclosure prevention counselors. It would also give tenants notice of pending foreclosures and spell out the terms for owners to get their homes back [...]

Consumer issues should not be “red state-blue state” issues. Everyone is a consumer. Republicans, Democrats, independents, Greens, Libertarians, anarchists . . . Everyone.
Debt collectors are not out to get Democrats, and mortgage brokers are not selling subprime loans only to Republicans. Payday lenders may be targeting evangelical Christians, but they are just as happy to [...]

The legal system and Web 2.0 still seem largely unaware of one another, although that is starting to change as lawyers and consumers make inreasing use of sites like Avvo, Facebook, Wikipediaand mypractice to find lawyers, to network, and to get information about the law.
With that in mind, I created Minnlawpedia, a wiki where [...]

You know that a new topic has hit the big time when Law & Order gets hold of it. In the lead-up to the settlement of the writers strike, NBC threw their hat into the ring concerning the current “ripped from the headlines” plot on Law & Order. The episode entitled Quit Claim [...]

I just ran across Kelly Klein’s “Renting and the Law” column at the Star Tribune.
Klein does a good job of sitting on the fence and offering a fairly neutral evaluation of landlord-tenant issues.
In her December 13th column, Klein discussed the importance of communication and written agreements (and side agreements). In her December 21st column, she [...]