Yuri Cunza, CEO of the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, decided to go the route of just making stuff up in the debate over Tennessee HB 1242 going to the floor of the Tennessee House tomorrow. The bill is a badly crafted bill that makes providing legal funding to working class Tennessee consumers impossible for any providers. It is short on consumer protections (though Tennessee consumers have not been complaining) and heavy on Big Insurance company protections.
So Mr. Yuri Cunza has decided at the last minute that the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce should speak its peace and throw in its cards with the US Chamber of Commerce and Big Insurance companies.
Not surprising, Yuri Cunza's Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce has a membership list that reads as the whose who of Big Insurance companies:
http://nahcc.weebly.com/...
So what wisdom did Mr. Yuri Cunza of the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce disseminate when throwing his support behind his Big Insurance benefactors?
To make his case for banning legal funding in Tennessee, he states that "What happens to the consumer? They may not only never see a penny from the legal settlement, they may be have to sell a car or a house to pay back the lender — if they even own a car or home."
First of all, every legal funding client receives hundreds or thousands of dollars from their legal settlement automatically and upfront by entering into a legal funding transaction. The proceeds they receive from the legal funding company belongs to them 100% upfront, which may potentially occur years before they see a penny from the Big Insurance companies dragging out their claim.
Second, the foundation of legal funding is that it is non-recourse. Any legal funding consumer that receives funding from a legal funding company has no obligation (zero!) to pay the legal funding company back if there are insufficient proceeds from the legal claim. That is Legal Funding 101!
So Mr. Yuri Cunza clearly does not understand that legal funding companies are making investments, and a legal funding transaction is not a debt product. No one ever has to hawk their car to get out of an obligation. Mr Yuri Cunza must be confusing legal funding with the payday industry, which just had the Tennessee General Assembly approve rates of 276% per year, well over the made up and inflated rates that Mr. Yuri Cunza cries afoul about the legal funding industry needing to charge to be profitable. And was Mr. Yuri Cunza voicing the views of the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce last week when the Payday bill came up for debate in the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce?
Not as far as I am aware. But then, I do not believe any of his member Big Insurance companies felt a need to then because the customers of Payday lenders are not suing them and disrupting their business model of having economic superiority over consumers that they are litigating against.
And by the way, Mr. Yuri Cunza totally mischaracterizes the bill to ban that already made it through the Tennessee Senate. He does not even get that bill's rate caps right.
If you are going to go public with your statements, Mr. Yuri Cunza, you might want to fact check the paper that the US Chamber of Commerce asks you and the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to put your names to.