Defending People

the tao of criminal-defense trial lawyering

Meet Gurstel Chargo, “Honest Americans” {updated}

From Min­nesota law firm Gurs­tel Chargo’s “what we do” page:

Our prac­tice blend is uniquely designed to pro­vide busi­nesses with finan­cial solu­tions and asset recov­ery. Our focus pro­vides sophis­ti­cated and occa­sion­ally unlikely solu­tions to our clients fis­cally dri­ven matters.

From their meaning-free-mumbo-jumbo-laden “cred­i­tors rights” page:

We have devel­oped sophis­ti­cated sys­tems and insti­tuted soft-touch col­lec­tion prac­tices that pro­duce favor­able results.

Gurs­tel Chargo’s response to a dis­abled vet­eran try­ing to recover $6,000 of ungar­nish­able money that Gurs­tel Chargo had gar­nished, after the firm had told a judge that the firm would release the money “right away”:

Fuck you! Pay us your money! You can’t afford an attor­ney. You owe us. I hope your wife divorces your ass. If you would have served our coun­try bet­ter you would not be a dis­abled vet­eran liv­ing off social secu­rity while the rest of us hon­est Amer­i­cans work our ass off. Too bad; you should have died.

(Cour­t­house News Ser­vice.)

An “unlikely solu­tion”, sure, but “soft-touch”? “sophisticated”?

The vet­eran, Michael Col­lier, can now, as it turns out, afford a lawyer. Floyd Bybee of Chan­dler, Ari­zona, has filed suit against Gurs­tel Chargo for, among other things, vio­lat­ing the Fair Debt Col­lec­tions Act. (Com­plaint.) Gurs­tel Chargo is being sued in eight other fed­eral cases in Ari­zona, Min­nesota, and Ohio.

The arti­cles dis­cussing this story describe it as a “debt collector”—which it is—but it’s also a law firm, which means it is held to higher stan­dards. If Gurs­tel Chargo aren’t already fac­ing griev­ances over this, they should be.

After all, account­abil­ity mat­ters (that link is a must-follow web archive of the page that Gurs­tel Chargo took down right after I pub­lished this post).

{Update: Gurs­tel Chargo’s lawyer, Andrew D. Parker, says that the Scotts­dale lawyer “acted pro­fes­sion­ally in all of his deal­ings with Mr. Col­lier and in the han­dling of this ease.” In light of the fact that the Col­liers have amended their peti­tion to omit the alle­ga­tion that Gurs­tel Chargo’s Scotts­dale lawyer had told them in the park­ing lot that they would need to hire a lawyer to get their money back (and that they now attribute that state­ment to the same legal assis­tant who told Col­lier, “fuck you!”), I have no rea­son to ques­tion Parker’s asser­tion. So I’ve removed that alle­ga­tion and the unfor­tu­nate lawyer’s name from this post.

Parker is con­fused about who I had said made the “fuck you” state­ment. That sen­tence in my orig­i­nal post may have been writ­ten in a way that could con­fuse a care­less reader; it should be clear now: it is the firm that Mr. Col­lier has alleged made the statement—an asser­tion, by the way, that Parker does not deny.

Parker also claims that my post “has resulted in threats being received against law firm staff.” I doubt that I have that sort of influ­ence; I hope that I don’t. I sus­pect that it would be more accu­rate to say that treat­ing a dis­abled vet­eran badly has resulted in threats against law firm staff. Which is itself unfor­tu­nate, but not attrib­ut­able to my lit­tle blog.}

Share

Tags: ,


This entry was posted by on Sunday, October 14th, 2012 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

About The Author

Mark Bennett got his letter of marque from the Supreme Court of Texas in May 1995. He is famous for having no sense of humor when it comes to totalitarianism.

Comments

17 Responses to “Meet Gurstel Chargo, “Honest Americans” {updated}”

  1. Anna Durbin says:
    14 October 2012 at 2:57 pm

    Access denied to the Account­abil­ity link. H’mm. What did it say before?

    Reply
  2. Anonymous says:
    15 October 2012 at 8:39 pm

    I am a recent (now past) employee of this law firm. FDCPA vio­la­tions hap­pen on a reg­u­lar basis, and I just wish that more peo­ple knew their rights, because suit could be legit­i­mately brought daily against the prac­tices of this firm. They do not train their employ­ees, and super­vi­sion of vio­la­tions is not a reg­u­lar prac­tice until suit is brought against them. They are happy as long as the money flows in. Ille­gal gar­nish­ments are reg­u­larly sought and granted, and they sim­ply have them reversed when they find out their mis­take, with­out any thought to the harm that comes in the mean­time (they tend to favor the end of the month right before many people’s rent comes due). There are good, hon­est attor­neys that work there who are over-worked in a factory-style prac­tice that does not allow them to prop­erly super­vise their prac­tice, but the major­ity of the lawyers they hire are so young and inex­pe­ri­enced with no super­vi­sion or men­tor­ship that they don’t know what they’re doing, and are under such con­sid­er­able pres­sure from above to pro­duce col­lectible judg­ments that they resort to ques­tion­able tac­tics with tacit approval from above, as is evi­denced by the actions of the attor­ney in this case. Debt col­lec­tion law firms like this one prey on the fact that peo­ple in gen­eral do not know what rights they have and are so in awe of legal papers served on them (and obvi­ously in such dire finan­cial straits) that they don’t seek legal coun­sel. And while I admit that there are many plain­tiffs in FDCPA cases who are sim­ply work­ing the sys­tem, the vast major­ity of honest-to-goodness vio­la­tion cases do not get filed because peo­ple do not know the law. It’s cases like this that raise pub­lic aware­ness and will hope­fully give vic­tims the knowl­edge to seek legal coun­sel when they are ille­gally harassed and intim­i­dated by preda­tory debt-collection practices.

    Reply
    • Ralph William Shields says:
      16 October 2012 at 3:05 am

      Wow — That’s a very stark assess­ment, and I can appre­ci­ate the commenter’s desire to remain anony­mous. Given the awful story that brought this to our atten­tion, I won­der whether this par­tic­u­lar firm makes a point of going after wounded and dis­abled Ser­vice Mem­bers and Veterans?

      Reply
  3. Ryan P says:
    16 October 2012 at 5:25 pm

    As a (very recent) for­mer employee myself, with no such con­cern for “anonymity”, I can unequiv­o­cally state that the firm does NOT “go after wounded and dis­abled ser­vice mem­bers”. There are a plethora of tools uti­lized to iden­tify, con­tact, locate, and col­lect on debts, but some­thing tar­get­ing dis­abled vets is not amongst them.

    As a dis­abled vet myself, I would have taken a per­sonal, burn­ing inter­est in whistle­blow­ing any such thing to every State AG, BBB, Con­gress­man, and VA Rep in my Rolodex.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous says:
    17 October 2012 at 6:00 pm

    Let me tell you how much they are hated for their nefar­i­ous ques­tion­able prac­tices and how para­noid they are. At one of their nicer offices in a very afflu­ent part of town, they keep them­selves under lock and key, only greet­ing vis­i­tors through a small win­dow. They also have a police offi­cer sta­tioned out front. Guilty as charged.

    Reply
    • David says:
      17 October 2012 at 8:00 pm

      You have no idea about the drib­ble you post about. Their firm is a col­lec­tion agency…what do you sup­pose they col­lect? Oh yeah, money which means they are like a bank and have sim­i­lar secu­rity prac­tices as such. Every col­lec­tion agency in the coun­try uses sim­i­lar secu­rity pro­to­cols so this makes them guilty of nothing.

      And when did Golden Val­ley, a very mid­dle class sub­urb become “afflu­ent”. Com­pared to what? Maybe North Min­neapo­lis so since I grew up in GV, I will have to start telling peo­ple of my fine upbring­ing! Haha.

      Reply
  5. David says:
    17 October 2012 at 7:52 pm

    It’s obvi­ous many who are postn across the inter­net have no idea what they speak of. My com­pany does doc­u­ment sup­port for law firms of which I have done work for Gurs­tel. I am no shill but have a far more accu­rate pic­ture of the events then most so my opin­ion does have merit where many just seek to add inflam­ma­tory rhetoric.

    This firm employs around 200 peo­ple so when those say it shouldn’t have hap­pened, they are right… Because it didn’t in the man­ner of which has been blogged about.

    Since the major­ity of blog­gers don’t have a grasp of the civil process of a law suit, let me fill them in. To gar­nish some­ones bank account is the last step which would have been done over sev­eral months of repeated phone calls, writ­ten notices and then a sum­mons served on them. At any time, the “debtor” could have con­tacted the col­lec­tion agency and told them he was on dis­abil­ity and with­out a doubt it would have ended… Period. If he didn’t bother to con­tact them, then the col­lec­tion agency would have NO WAY to know the funds in his wife’s account which in Ari­zona is a com­mu­nity prop­erty state, were from his dis­abil­ity pay­ments. NOT THERE FAULT.

    As to the inflam­ma­tory sup­posed harass­ment from the col­lec­tor, like all col­lec­tion agency’s, they record ALL their phone calls so after it gets proved no such call was made, then I nooe all those who have been trash­ing this firm have the guts to apol­o­gize for their mis­guided posts but I doubt most have the moral fiber to do so.

    Reply
    • phillip says:
      5 December 2012 at 7:49 am

      David, ignor­ing your hearsay, when the banks stop devalu­ing our cur­rency, and when they stop export­ing our jobs, and when they stop mis­rep­re­sent­ing what a col­lege edu­ca­tion will do under said con­di­tions while over­charg­ing for the “edu­ca­tion” in the first place, then they MIGHT get paid.

      Until such time, stfu.

      And that goes for the young, crass punks who work at the agen­cies also. I’ve seen some, and they couldn’t get a job them­selves except for one where they act like a punk. They are nasty lit­tle teenagers. I’ve seen them.

      Reply

Leave a non-anonymous Reply

«     »