4th Circuit affirms sanctions for attorneys in payday lawsuit

Courts Appellate Fourth Circuit Payday Lending Attorney Fees Sanctions

On May 31, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed sanctions against three attorneys for challenging the authenticity of a loan document for two years without revealing they had obtained a copy of the document from their client before filing the original complaint. The action results from a now closed case in which a consumer alleged he received loans at predatory interest rates (annual interest rate of about 139 percent) from a tribal lender and sought to impose liability on the non-lenders, including a credit union, which processed the debit transactions under the loan agreement. In response to a motion to dismiss, the attorneys for the consumer challenged the authenticity of the loan agreement provided by the credit union. After years of litigation, the credit union discovered the consumer had provided his attorneys with the loan agreement prior to the original complaint filing and moved for sanctions against the attorneys. The attorneys argued that they had no affirmative duty to disclose documents before the opening of discovery.

The lower court disagreed, determining that each attorney had “acted in bad faith and vexatiously and violated their duty of candor by hiding a relevant and potentially dispositive document from the Court in connection with a long-running dispute over arbitrability.” In February 2017, the lower court ordered two attorneys and their respective law firms jointly liable for $150,000 in attorneys’ fees and a third associate attorney jointly liable for $100,000. Upon appeal, the 4th Circuit held that the lower court did not abuse its discretion in awarding the compensatory sanctions, stating “without losing the forest for the trees, we conclude that the district court reasonably described sanctioned counsels’ conduct as evincing a multi-year crusade to suppress the truth to gain a tactical litigation advantage.”