Federal Jury Awards $311,000 to Montana Man Targeted by Time-Barred Debt Lawsuit
A federal jury found that a North Dakota debt-collection law firm violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by filing and pursuing a credit card lawsuit it knew was barred by Montana's statute of limitations, awarding Timothy McCollough $311,000 in statutory, emotional distress, and punitive damages.
What happened
In 1999, Timothy McCollough made his last payment on a Chase Manhattan credit card carrying roughly $3,000 in unpaid charges. The account was charged off in 2000 and eventually sold to a debt buyer. Under Montana law, a creditor has five years to sue on a written contract. That window closed years before anyone came looking.
In April 2007, Johnson, Rodenburg and Lauinger (JRL), a law firm in North Dakota that collected debts on behalf of buyers, filed suit against McCollough in Montana state court. The firm obtained a summons and served McCollough, who had no attorney. Within months, JRL's own records showed the debt was time-barred. The firm dismissed the state case in December 2007 only after continuing to press McCollough for payment, sending requests for admission that did not disclose the 30-day consequence of failing to respond.
McCollough retained Billings attorney John Heenan and brought a federal claim under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The FDCPA prohibits debt collectors, including law firms acting as collectors, from filing lawsuits on debts they know or should know are time-barred, from seeking fees not authorized by the underlying agreement, and from using false or misleading collection methods.
At a three-day jury trial in federal district court in Montana, Heenan presented testimony from other debtors who had faced similar suits from JRL, along with a consumer law attorney and a collection-practices expert. The jury heard that JRL had relied on representations from its client about the debt's validity without any independent check, even after internal documents flagged the limitations problem. The jury found JRL liable on multiple FDCPA counts and also found for McCollough on state-law claims of malicious prosecution and abuse of process.
The jury awarded $1,000 in FDCPA statutory damages, $250,000 for emotional distress, and $60,000 in punitive damages, for a total of $311,000. JRL appealed, arguing it qualified for the FDCPA's bona fide error defense on the ground that it had relied on its client's representations. The Ninth Circuit rejected that argument on March 4, 2011, holding that reliance on a creditor's unverified representations is unreasonable as a matter of law when the firm has no procedures designed to catch such errors. The court affirmed the full verdict without reduction.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.9th Circuit Court of Appeals: McCOLLOUGH v. JOHNSON RODENBURG LAUINGER LLC, 637 F.3d 939 (9th Cir. 2011)·Archived copy
- 2.FindLaw: McCOLLOUGH v. JOHNSON RODENBURG LAUINGER LLC (9th Cir. 2011)
- 3.Billings Gazette: Man sues collector's lawyers, wins lawsuit·Archived copy
- 4.Billings Gazette: He took the fight to debt collectors, and he collected·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Heenan & Cook Injury and Accident Attorneys
All Heenan & Cook Injury and Accident Attorneys proven verdicts →At CoreCivic's Crossroads Correctional Center in Shelby, Montana, an inmate serving a double life sentence let himself out of his own locked pod and into Nathaniel Lake's, then beat and choked him for more than three and a half minutes with no staff intervention. Lake was in a coma for 33 days and has a permanent brain injury.
A federal jury awarded $15 million to two families whose loved ones died at Canyon Creek Memory Care during a 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, finding the Billings facility and its parent company Koelsch Senior Communities liable for neglect through chronic understaffing.
Heenan and Cook secured a $9 million settlement from Custer County District High School on behalf of 32 former student athletes who were sexually abused over decades by longtime school athletic trainer James 'Doc' Jensen.
In 2015 a woman on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation called authorities because she was worried someone might be drinking and driving. The Bureau of Indian Affairs officer who responded assaulted her. A federal judge fixed damages at $1.6 million in 2020, and after nearly a decade of litigation over whether the United States was responsible, ordered it to pay in 2025.
Related Montana verdicts
Ralph Hutt worked 18 months at W.R. Grace's asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mill in Libby, Montana in the late 1960s and developed asbestosis decades later. A Cascade County jury found the mill's workers' compensation insurer, Maryland Casualty Company, breached an independent duty to warn him about hazards it tracked through undisclosed chest X-rays, and awarded $36.5 million in February 2022. The trial judge completed Montana's mandatory review of the punitive portion in January 2023 and declined to reduce it, calling the insurer's conduct reprehensible. Maryland Casualty appealed, but the appeal ended in a confidential settlement in 2024, so the verdict itself, not any later court reduction, is what stood.
Jeremy Vangsnes, a 21-year-old cross-country athlete who was left quadriplegic and brain-injured after a 2009 rollover on Interstate 90 near Belgrade, Montana, settled for $26 million against the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention after a judge ruled the driver was acting within the scope of his agency with the organization.
A Gallatin County jury awarded $15 million to Catharine Hudgens after her husband Lew died from carbon monoxide poisoning in their honeymoon cabin at Rainbow Ranch Lodge in Big Sky, Montana, returning what the plaintiff's firm described as more than double the county's previous largest verdict.
Lew and Catharine Hudgens of Alabama were poisoned by carbon monoxide that seeped into their room from an adjacent boiler room during their honeymoon at Rainbow Ranch Lodge in Big Sky, Montana, and were not found for four days, after Catharine's sister twice asked lodge staff to check on them. Lew died and Catharine was left with permanent brain damage. A Gallatin County jury heard the case against Rainbow Ranch Holdings and related defendants over close to two weeks and returned a combined $15 million verdict on April 10, 2024, assigning 65 percent of the fault to the lodge and the rest to parties that had already settled confidentially, which leaves the lodge answerable for $9.75 million of it under Montana's apportionment statute. Local reporters described it as more than double the largest jury award previously recorded in the county. No appeal has been located.