Leonard A. Bennett

He has litigated well over a thousand complex consumer cases in federal courts across the country, and two of his Fourth Circuit appeals wrote the rules that furnishers of credit information now live under.

What MBNA Checked After Notice

Linda Johnson disputed a roughly $17,000 MBNA credit-card balance after her former husband entered bankruptcy. Her position was simple and legally decisive: she had been an authorized user on the account, not a co-obligor. She was allowed to use the card; she had never promised to pay the debt.

The credit bureaus relayed her specific dispute to MBNA. The bank's agents then "verified" the account — by consulting the same internal computer system that identified her as responsible in the first place. They compared limited fields on a summary screen. They never consulted the underlying documents. The original application, the one paper that could have settled who actually signed, was no longer even available.

A jury found that MBNA negligently failed to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act and awarded Johnson $90,300 in actual damages. On appeal, MBNA argued the statute required only a brief review of its own records. Bennett, representing Johnson, persuaded the Fourth Circuit otherwise. The court affirmed and held that a furnisher receiving a dispute through a credit bureau must conduct a reasonable investigation to determine whether the information can be verified — and approved an instruction weighing the cost of verification against the harm inaccurate reporting inflicts. A dispute involving a large balance and a basic question of legal responsibility could require more than checking whether a name and address matched. If a fuller search found no decisive record, the bank had to report that it could not conclusively verify her responsibility.

Johnson v. MBNA became the standard. The reasonable-investigation duty Bennett established on that appeal now governs furnishers nationwide.

When the Dispute Itself Was Missing

Saunders v. BB&T tested the next link in the chain. Rex Saunders repeatedly tried to get the information he needed to pay his car loan while the bank's own error delayed booking it. BB&T then demanded the balance plus charges, repossessed the car, and reported severe derogatory information to the bureaus. Saunders disputed the account — and the bank's response to the credit bureau omitted the fact that the dispute existed at all.

The jury found a willful Fair Credit Reporting Act violation and awarded $1,000 in statutory damages and $80,000 in punitive damages. Bennett took the appeal, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed in full, explaining that information can be incomplete or inaccurate when an omission creates a materially misleading impression — even if the reported debt figure is technically correct in isolation. The bank's own records documented Saunders's repeated contacts and his effort to resolve the problem; the trial evidence showed the account was intentionally reported without noting the dispute. A jury could find that the omission changed how the bureau scored the account and how a future lender would read it. When the bank challenged the punitive award on due-process grounds, Bennett defended that too, and the Fourth Circuit left both awards standing.

Johnson requires a furnisher to examine the records responsive to the consumer's objection. Saunders requires the furnisher to tell the bureau the debt remains disputed when silence would mislead. Bennett preserved both rules, on appeal, in the circuit where much of the credit industry litigates.

Proving That a Paid Debt Was Paid

Brim v. Midland Credit Management carried the reporting problem into debt collection. Mr. Brim had paid his debt. His original creditor applied the payment to a different account, and a bookkeeping phantom — a balance owed by no one — was sold to a debt buyer, who set about collecting it.

Bennett traced the asserted balance backward through receipts, account histories, collection records, and bureau reports until the origin of the error stood exposed: the balance arose from a misapplied payment, not an unpaid obligation. Even after Brim supplied the contrary information, the debt buyer kept relying on the reported number. At trial, Bennett connected the misapplied payment to each subsequent collection and reporting entry — one documented course of conduct running from the original payment through the creditor's allocation, the debt buyer's account history, the bureau entries, the disputes, and the responses returned to the bureaus. The federal jury returned a $723,000 verdict under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Refunds, Canceled Balances, and Data Limits

Bennett's class work reaches the lending itself. In Gibbs v. Rees and TCV, he represented a national class of borrowers who took loans at rates they alleged violated applicable law, offered through claimed ties to American Indian tribes. The settlement required $50 million in cash, voided the challenged loans, and barred further collection.

A related Gibbs settlement involving Plain Green and Great Plains resolved allegations that the loans exceeded state rate limits, lacked required state licenses, and were serviced or collected unlawfully. Its terms tracked the entire life of a loan: about $55.75 million in refunds repaid money already taken; voided debts and collection limits addressed balances still being asserted; a transfer ban kept the accounts from being placed with another collector; and a separate provision barred the sale of borrowers' personal information. Nothing survived to chase the class members later.

His class practice has also reshaped how the background-check industry operates — including a resolution of the Fair Credit Reporting Act claims of approximately 454,000 consumers that led one of the country's largest employers to revise its background-check procedures.

Current Practice

Bennett founded Consumer Litigation Associates and has practiced as a trial lawyer and consumer advocate since 1994. Fair Credit Reporting Act litigation is central to his national individual and class practice, and the method never varies: the work begins with the consumer's own account documents, then follows the records the creditor, collector, or bureau created after the consumer objected.

His authority in the field extends well beyond his docket. He presented Congressional testimony on the Fair Credit Reporting Act before the House Committee on Financial Services in 2003, 2007, and 2008. He is a contributing editor to the National Consumer Law Center's Fair Credit Reporting manual — the treatise the field practices from — and serves on NCLC's Partners Council and the board of Public Justice. He has taught the law to fellow advocates at NACA and NCLC conferences, to bar CLE audiences, to law students, and to Navy and Army JAG officers. The National Association of Consumer Advocates named him its Consumer Lawyer of the Year in 2017, and in 2025 he received the Vern Countryman Award, the consumer law field's highest honor.

He earned a B.A. from George Mason University in 1989 and a J.D. from its law school in 1994, and is admitted in Virginia, North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court, and multiple federal appellate courts.