Operational guides for collections law firms
These guides cover the operational half of collections practice — what to do when a validation request arrives, how the 7-in-7 rule is counted, what a filing package has to contain, what a bank's risk team will ask and what a firm's audit file should hold. Each one is written for someone who needs an answer this afternoon, and every legal statement is cited to the regulation, statute or agency guidance it comes from.
Key facts
- Ten guides, covering the federal rules that govern contact and reporting, and the court and client-facing work that surrounds them.
- Every legal assertion cites a primary source — the eCFR, govinfo, the CFPB, or a court or agency's own publication.
- Where an official source could not be retrieved, the guide says so on the page instead of citing a commercial mirror.
- State-specific material is limited to jurisdictions actually researched; nothing here claims nationwide coverage.
The federal rules, in practice
Four guides cover the parts of the FDCPA, Regulation F and the FCRA that a collections firm touches every day: responding to a validation request and what verification actually requires, counting the 7-in-7 call limit correctly, building a validation notice from a placement file, and handling a dispute that arrives through a credit bureau rather than through the mail. A fifth covers call recording and retention — including the point that nothing in Regulation F requires recording at all.
The work around the file
Five guides cover what happens outside the contact rules: the documents a filing package has to carry, the questionnaire a bank's third-party risk team will send and what a good answer to each section contains, what belongs in an audit file, when SCRA and bankruptcy scrubs must run, and how e-filing paths differ once volume makes the difference matter.
How these are sourced
Each guide carries its sources at the foot of the page with a verbatim quote from the primary text, and each quote was re-fetched and confirmed present in the response body rather than trusted on a status code — several government sites now return a page shell with no statutory text. Where a state's official publisher served no readable text, the guide names the states it can support and says plainly which it cannot, rather than filling the gap from a commercial mirror.
What these are not
These are reference documents, not legal advice, and reading one creates no attorney-client relationship. They describe rules of general application; your client's instructions, your jurisdiction's local practice and your own professional judgement all sit on top of them. Confirm against the primary source before you calendar a deadline, plead a claim or advise anyone.
This is an informational reference, not legal advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Limitations periods turn on facts this page cannot know — which state's law governs, the contract type, when the claim accrued, and whether anything tolled or revived it. Confirm against the primary source and your own counsel before acting.