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 must contain, and what a bank's risk team will ask. Each is written for someone who needs an answer this afternoon, and every legal statement is cited.

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.

The vendor layer

Three guides cover the software relationships the practice runs on, sourced to the vendors' own published documents rather than to folklore: the diligence questions to ask JST after Embrace Software's 2026 acquisition, the questions Collection-Master firms should put to Vertican about its published convergence path to Q-LawE, and a plain-English explainer of the YGC/vExchange file format that moves placements, statuses and money records between creditors and firms. These state industry and vendor facts, not law; every quotation carries a link and the date we read it.

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.

In this section

• How to respond to a debt validation requestWhat a written dispute inside the validation period actually stops, what verification has to contain, and when a firm may start collecting again.
• Regulation F's 7-in-7 rule in practiceHow to count calls under 12 CFR 1006.14(b): what an attempt is, why counting runs per debt, the seven days after a conversation, and how both presumptions are rebutted.
• Building a validation notice from a placement fileChoosing the itemization date from what the placement file can actually prove, populating the required content of 12 CFR 1006.34(c), and what the Model Form B-1 safe harbor does and does not cover.
• When a consumer disputes to a credit bureauThe FCRA investigation duty on a furnisher, the 30-day clock it runs on, how a bureau dispute differs from a direct dispute, and what furnishing must reflect once the investigation closes.
• Call recording and retention for collections firmsConsent before you record, the Regulation F retention rule and its three-year clock, and what a bank or a CFPB examiner is entitled to ask for.
• What documents you need to file suit on a credit-card debtThe evidence a collections firm needs in hand before a credit-card complaint goes out: chain of title, account-level documentation, the signed agreement and its alternatives, affidavit requirements, and how proof expectations differ across Florida, Georgia, Texas and New York.
• The bank third-party-risk questionnaire, question by questionWhat a bank's third-party risk management team asks a collection law firm and why: the interagency guidance the questions come from, and what a good answer contains on information security, subcontractors, complaint handling, business continuity and audit rights.
• What a collections firm's audit file should containThe artifacts an examiner or a bank's client auditor expects to find on a single collections account, and how each one maps to a moment in the life of the file.
• SCRA and bankruptcy scrubs: what each protects and when the check must runWhat the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act and the Bankruptcy Code each protect against, when each check has to run, the DMDC and PACER data paths, and what missing one costs.
• Choosing an e-filing path by court, for high-volume filersHow electronic filing differs across the Florida, Georgia, Texas and New York court systems, what an electronic filing service provider does and does not do, and which design choices break at volume.
• CollectMax after the Embrace acquisition: what to ask JST nowEmbrace Software acquired JST, the maker of CollectMax and Accis, in early 2026. What both announcements actually say, who Embrace is by its own account, and the diligence questions any firm should put to an acquired vendor — support, roadmap, pricing, and data export rights.
• Collection-Master firms: the questions to ask VerticanVertican says Collection-Master is here to stay and that its future converges on Q-LawE — both in the same February 2025 deck. The diligence questions that turn those published statements into written answers: support, roadmap, pricing, data export, and the exchange network.
• The YGC and vExchange file format, explainedWhat actually moves between a creditor and a collections law firm on the YGC/vExchange network: placements down as record type 01, statuses as pcodes, the S101 acknowledgment, money and status records back up as types 30 through 46, and the translation tables in between — sourced to the vendors' published documentation.
• Wage garnishment in Florida: procedure for judgment creditorsHow a judgment creditor garnishes wages in Florida: the post-judgment motion and continuing writ under chapter 77, the deadlines that run from service on the garnishee and the defendant, the head-of-family exemption in Fla. Stat. § 222.11, and the federal CCPA floor beneath it.
• Wage garnishment in Georgia: the continuing garnishmentHow a judgment creditor garnishes wages in Georgia: the affidavit and summons of continuing garnishment under O.C.G.A. Title 18, Chapter 4, the 1,095-day garnishment period, the 30-to-45-day answer windows, and the hard-coded exemption formula in § 18-4-5 — quoted from the enrolled 2020 Act, because Georgia serves no stable public text of its code.
• Wage garnishment in Texas: why the answer is a bank writWhy Texas judgment creditors do not garnish wages — Tex. Const. art. XVI, § 28 exempts current wages except court-ordered support — and what works instead: the chapter 63 writ against the debtor’s bank, Rule 663a service and the 2022 protected-property notices, the turnover statute, and post-judgment interest under Fin. Code § 304.003.
• Wage garnishment in New York: the CPLR 5231 income executionHow a New York judgment creditor reaches wages: the CPLR 5231 income execution, its 10%-of-gross ceiling inside 25%-of-disposable caps, the two-stage service by sheriff or New York City marshal, priority against other executions and support orders, and the 2% consumer-debt judgment interest rate.

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.