Recovering Legal Fees

Posted On: 2006-01-26
Length: 15:42

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Hey everybody, and welcome back to your Debt Podcast. Today is Thursday, January 26, 2006. My name is Jay Fleischman and thanks for staying subscribed and for listening to the show. If you've got any questions or comments, please go to the website and send us an email or you can send it directly to debtpodcast@gmail.com. You can also send your audio feedback to area code 206-202-5231. And that's going to get to us in just the same way, in a nice little compact wav file. Love that wav file. Anyway, we're going to jump right off today, we've got a little bit of privacy news headlines for you.

And now the latest headlines from the world of personal finance.

Ok. So today's headlines form the world of personal finance. Pretty interesting stuff. This is a court of appeals case out of the fourth circuit, coming up from the western district of Virginia, out of a place called Big Stone Gap. The name of the case is Buckto vs. Elaine L. Chou, Secretary of Labor. Really impressive sounding. But it came down just two days ago, and I thought it was interesting to bring it up to everybody out there because what the case was about was originally in 1997 action brought against the U.S. Secretary of Labor seeking damages under the privacy act for the wrongful disclosure of the plaintiff's social security number. Now it was originally held that there has to be a showing of actual damages in order for a plaintiff to recover the statutory damage amount of a thousand dollars. And that went all the way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court agreed with that. But what this case does is it speaks not to obtaining actual damages, but the ability of the plaintiff to obtain cost and reimbursement of attorneys fees, or an award of attorneys fees...