Video Transcript:

Hello, my name is Ian Leavengood. I'm the founder of LeavenLaw and the partner in charge of its creditor harassment and class action divisions.

We're here today because you've made the decision to hire LeavenLaw for representation regarding your debts in one form or another. Whether or not you've decided to hire the firm for bankruptcy protection, you've been sued by a creditor or a debt buyer, you're facing foreclosure, or you've just decided to seek assistance to try and settle your debts without litigation, LeavenLaw in its consumer protection attorneys offer services to you a LeavenLaw client, that you may not be aware of. These are very important consumer protections, not only that are gonna provide you peace of mind, but importantly could provide you monetary damages if you understand your rights, you understand the process, and you help us help you.

So you've retained LeavenLaw. What's the next step? Well, one of the things that our firm will do once you've retained us for representation regarding your debt, we take great steps to make sure that we provide notice of representation to all of your creditors, to any debt collectors that may be contacting you to collect a debt. The reason being is there are both federal and state laws that provide protections to you, the consumer debtor, that prohibit creditors and debt collectors from continuing to communicate with you after they have noticed that you have retained an attorney for representation regarding your debt. Any of those different types of practice areas, again whether it's bankruptcy, credit card or debt buyer defense, debt settlement, or mortgage foreclosure, all of those types of representations necessarily require us to represent you with regard to your debt.

What we do is we will take steps to send faxes of representation to all of your creditors and debt collectors, letting them know that you've hired LeavenLaw, and that any further communications should be sent to our office. We do this via faxes, we do this via certified letter, and we do this via emails. We have spent decades building this database of information to offer you, the LeavenLaw client, these consumer protections. Once the faxes of representation, the notices of representation, have been received by the creditors or debt collectors, your phone should stop ringing. Letters, monthly statements, should stop coming. Instead, those communications need to come to us, your attorney, so we can look at those communications. We understand the creditors and debt collectors that are out there, and we have the ability to provide you counsel with regard to your debt. That's the way the law is set up, and that's what creditors and debt collectors are supposed to do.

Not surprisingly, or at least not surprisingly to me, an attorney who's been doing this for over 20 years, creditors and debt collectors do not always abide by the law. In fact, many times in our experience, they will ignore our notices of representation. They will disregard the fact that you may have answered a telephone call and told them that you have hired LeavenLaw for representation. Instead, creditors and debt collectors typically are after one thing and one thing alone, and that is payment on your debt. So, if you receive these calls, and you receive these letters, you receive the monthly billing statements from these creditors and debt collectors after you know that we have represented to them that you have hired an attorney, you could be entitled to monetary damages.

Your next question may be, "Well, how am I going to know when you, my attorney has told all of these creditors about our representation?" It's a great question. We will be sending you a Creditor Harassment Protection Center notification email that essentially will advise you all of the creditors and all of the debt collectors that we have taken great steps to notify of the representation. From that point forward, no communications can come in to you. If they do, you could be entitled to statutory damages under one of three laws.

First of all, the Florida Act, it's called the Florida Consumer Collection Practices Act, that prohibits anybody from communicating with you once they know you've hired an attorney. Its sister statute, the Federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act similarly prohibits direct-to-you communications to collect the debt, but that only applies to debt collectors and debt buyers. Finally, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a statute that governs robo calls, calls that are placed to your cell phone using a computer or an automated or prerecorded voice, those are also prohibited. In each of these statutes, you could be entitled to monetary damages, in some cases $1,000, in some cases two. In the case of robo calls to your cell phone, you could be entitled to between 500 and $1,500 per call placed to your cell phone after they know that you've hired an attorney.

So as you can see, these consumer protection statutes, not only do they provide you peace of mind, and they're supposed to provide the privacy that they were intended to give. They also could be very lucrative to you. They could provide you statutory damages not only to help settle debts, to help pay bills, but in a way, to finance your bankruptcy, to finance your mortgage foreclosure defense, to pay for your attorney's fees. This is what makes LeavenLaw distinct from other consumer attorneys in the Tampa Bay area, in that we have great knowledge of these laws and we go to great lengths to make sure we educate you, the LeavenLaw client on the laws, and how you can help us to eliminate your debt and to finance your fresh start.

If you have any questions about any of these laws, there are many different ways you can educate yourself. First and foremost, do not hesitate to contact LeavenLaw. Ask to speak to me or any of the consumer protection attorneys, and we will be happy to answer your questions and go over the process and the program. Additionally, we have many resources available both online, and in the email referenced earlier, that allow you to read up on these statutes, to understand the protections that are available, to understand the damages that are available to you, and more importantly, educate you on the steps that you need to take to make sure you give us the information we need to help you get your fresh start.

I know that this can be a challenging time, but we think that you've made the right decision in hiring LeavenLaw to assist you with your consumer debts, and we will go above and beyond to make sure that we provide you all of the consumer protections that we possibly can. We will look forward to helping you. Please let us know if you have any questions. Thank you.

Video Transcript:

So as a LeavenLaw client, one of the things that you're going to get, regardless of the type of representation that you've invoked with our firm, is a LeavenLaw folder. In this folder is going to be a couple important pieces of information to help educate you on the creditor harassment protection that we as a firm provide and give the tools necessary to capture the information we need to help you.

Importantly, there's going to be inside that folder it communications along. A communications log is essentially a tool that we have created and we give to our clients that enable you to capture the information, the details that are necessary on any debt collection calls that are placed to you that allow us to advocate for you and potentially recover damages.

For example, if a call comes in after a creditor knows that you've hired LeavenLaw for representation regarding your debt, there are certain facts and circumstances that we want to try and capture on every call. The date of the call, note the date, the time of the call. Importantly, if the phone number shows up on your caller ID, whether it's at home or on your cell phone, please take the time to note the telephone number that the call was placed from. If you speak to someone, we have a spot on the communications log where we would like for you not to dictate the entire conversation but to make notes, highlights of the conversation so we will have that information available to us in our consumer protection program. Things like the name of the caller, the company that called, if there was a conversation about our representation or about the debt, please make general notes on the communications log.

These details are critical to our ability to advocate for you and to try and collect monetary damages under either the Florida Consumer Collection Practices Act, the Federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, or the Federal Telephone Consumer Protection Practices Act.

The last thing that I will note, and again, this is of critical importance. If debt collection calls are placed to your cell phone, sometimes when you answer the telephone call, there will not be a live person waiting on the other end. There may be dead air. You may say hello a couple of times waiting for someone to come on and no one comes on. Then you may hear a click and sometimes this silence is then filled with a vacuum of people talking. You can hear commotion in the background. You can then hear someone, a representative or employee for the person calling you who's then asking for you or perhaps your spouse, and then they will begin a dialogue traditionally about collecting a debt. If you hear any of these facts and circumstances, also including a prerecorded voicemail message that may be almost an on hold message until the live agent can get on the phone, all of these facts and circumstances are telltale signs that they're using a computer to place robocalls to your cell phone.

Whenever robocalls are placed to your cell phone after that credit or a debt collector has been advised that you've hired an attorney for representation regarding the debt, each call thereafter is unlawful. It violates consumer protection laws and could entitle you, the LeavenLaw client, to damages. While we can't guarantee any result, we can guarantee that we will fight hard for you, and in our experience calls like that placed to a cell phone after that creditor or debt collector has been notified of representation regarding the debt are worth between $500 and $1,500 per call to you, the consumer represented by an attorney.

You can now see why educating yourself about these laws using the tools that LeavenLaw provides to you and capturing that information to get it back to us greatly assists us not only in managing the debt, what you came to us for in the first place, but also in advocating for you and using the consumer protections available to try and eliminate the debt and possibly put money damages in your pocket.

The best thing about all of these programs is you, the client, don't owe us anything out of pocket. These cases are contingent cases. You do not have to pay us costs or attorney's fees as a down payment or retainer. If we prevail on the case, the fees are paid by the offending creditor or debt collector. If we do not prevail on the case, you owe us nothing.

As you can see, these are very, very important consumer protections laws that LeavenLaw and its attorneys have educated themselves on over the years, and we are here to provide these protections and possible monetary damages to you, the consumer, in route to your fresh start.

Thank you. And we will look forward to assisting you.

After Cease and Desist

Calls at Work

Calling Third Parties

Calls During Off Hours

Calls with With No Identification

Consumer Debt Laws

Deadbeat Letter

Debt Collect Unfairly