John L. Culhane, Jr.

Firm/Organization: Ballard Spahr LLP
Blogs: CyberAdviser, Health Care Reform Dashboard, Consumer Finance Monitor

Latest Articles

school hallway
Earlier this week, Judge Randolph D. Moss of the D.C. federal district court heard oral argument on the renewed motion for a preliminary injunction filed by the California Association of Private Postsecondary Schools (CAPPS) seeking to preliminary enjoin the arbitration ban and class action waiver provisions in the “borrower defense” final rule (Final Rule) issued by the Dept. of Education in November 2016 pending the resolution of the lawsuit filed by CAPPS against the ED…
The FDIC’s Center for Financial Research has issued a research paper that discusses the use of the information contained in a “digital footprint,” meaning the information that people leave online by accessing or registering on a website, for predicting consumer default. The researchers considered ten digital footprint variables that included: The device type (e.g. tablet or mobile) The operating system (e.g. iOS or Android) The channel through which a customer comes to a website (e.g.…
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPR) on which it invites public comment “to solicit ideas for building a new framework to transform or on ways to transform or modernize the regulations that implement the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA).”  The ANPR follows the Treasury Department’s issuance of a memorandum in April 2018 that made recommendations for modernizing the CRA to reflect the…
The Department of Education has issued a proposal that would rescind the “Borrower Defense” final rule issued by the ED in November 2016 and replace it with the “Institutional Accountability regulations” contained in the proposal.  Among the major changes to the final rule that would be made by the proposal is the removal of the final rule’s ban on the use of pre-dispute arbitration agreements  and class action waivers for borrower defense claims by schools…
After a four-day trial, the Ohio federal district court hearing the CFPB’s lawsuit against a law firm, Weltman, Weinberg & Reis Co., L.P.A., found that the CFPB had failed to prove its FDCPA and CFPA claims by a preponderance of the evidence.  By injecting some much needed logic in the approach to these types of claims, the decision should serve as helpful precedent. The CFPB’s complaint alleged that the debt collection letters sent by…
Two U.S. Senators, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, have sent a letter to FCC Chairman Pai to encourage the FCC to proceed with a rulemaking to create a database of reassigned telephone numbers. The TCPA’s autodialed call prohibition excepts calls made “with the prior express consent of the called party.”  In its March 2018 decision in ACA International v. FCC, the D.C. Circuit set aside the FCC’s one-call safe harbor as…
The CFPB has issued a new report, “Data Point: Final Student Loan Payments and Broader Household Borrowing,” which looks at repayment patterns for student loans and how borrowers who have repaid their student loans subsequently use credit.  The CFPB’s analysis focuses on borrowers when they first pay off individual student loans.  The report uses data from the Bureau’s Consumer Credit Panel, a nationally-representative sample of approximately five million de-identified credit records maintained by…
Rackmounted Servers in a Datacenter
The New York Department of Financial Services (“NYDFS”) has adopted a regulation that requires “consumer credit reporting agencies” (“CCRAs”) to register with the NYDFS, prohibits CCRAs from engaging in certain practices, and requires CCRAs to comply with certain provisions of the NYDFS cybersecurity regulation.…
Rackmounted Servers in a Datacenter
The New York Department of Financial Services (“NYDFS”) has adopted a regulation that requires “consumer credit reporting agencies” (“CCRAs”) to register with the NYDFS, prohibits CCRAs from engaging in certain practices, and requires CCRAs to comply with certain provisions of the NYDFS cybersecurity regulation.…
The New York Department of Financial Services (“NYDFS”) has adopted a regulation that requires “consumer credit reporting agencies” (“CCRAs”) to register with the NYDFS, prohibits CCRAs from engaging in certain practices, and requires CCRAs to comply with certain provisions of the NYDFS cybersecurity regulation. The new regulation became effective upon the publication of a Notice of Adoption by the NYDFS in the State Register on July 3, 2018.  Its definitions of “consumer credit report”  and…