Who would come to mind if you were asked about your most important business relationships? Would it be your largest clients, your employees, your peers? How about your smallest clients or even your competitors? The truth is All relationships are important to those who are most successful in business.

Countless books and articles have been written on the “How-To” of building effective relationships. Our goal in this blog is just to get you thinking about your relationships, which ones are most important to you, which ones you might benefit from improving and one or two tips with which to get started.

Are you an attorney who specializes in creditors’ rights or who practices even partially in that area? Would you like more creditors to know you have expertise in that branch of the law?  Read the full post.

On July 16^th, InsideARM announced disturbing restrictions that could be placed on the debt collection industry as a result of the FTC’s $3.2 million consent order with a major debt collector. The article stated, “Importantly, the consent order apparently prohibits the use of the widely accepted Foti phone message in certain circumstances and also requires debt collectors to honor verbal cease requests and disputes.

In a podcast linked to the article, attorneys John Rossman, Chair of creditors remedies group, and Mike Poncin (Moss & Barnett) discuss the implications of the order and give ideas for future compliance. Listen to the clip or go to The Debt Collection Drill.

I read on InsideARM.com on July 3rd about the following change to the CA Debt Collection Law:

The California General Assembly Monday unanimously passed a bill that requires debt buyers in the state to have in their possession a long list of account information before debt collection efforts can begin.  The new law also mandates specific disclosure language debt buyers must use in collection communications.

I contacted George Cohn, Senior Attorney with Collection Lawyers and author of the NL white paper about California debt collection law, and asked him to comment on the Bill. What follows is an edited version of his response. All of the information he provided has been added as a new white paper, California Debt Buying Practices Act (FDBPA), which is a supplement to the CA White Paper on the NL website.

The State-by-state summaries of Debt Collection Laws and Federal Bankruptcy Court Information have been updated for 2013 and are available for download on www.nationallist.com to registered users.  Registration is FREE.

If you ordered a hardcopy of The National List 2013-14 Directory, it will be shipped from the printer in Maryland the week of  July 22nd! You can expect to see it in your mailbox in a week or less after that date, depending on mail service to your area. But why wait! You can check out the latest information with just the click of your mouse!

“The generic label ‘predictive dialer’ is very misleading, especially within the ARM industry,” says Ray Fowler, IAT Sales & Marketing Director. “Collection managers are frequently frustrated by their predictive dialing choice, because its capabilities are limited.”  According to IAT, definitions of “predictive dialer” vary across the collection industry. In today’s blog, we summarize the differences for our members and clients who might be first-timers in the market for a predictive dialer, or who might want to upgrade the technology they have. If you want more information on the features you should be looking for or should have in a predictive dialer, check out IAT’s recently published white paper “What is True Predictive Dialing?”

The debt collection industry is constantly evolving, and the current trend is all about compliance. Because at The National List we know it is key to continually keep up with the changes in the industry, in May I participated in a webinar on Compliance Management Systems (CMS), sponsored by KirkpatrickPrice, a data security company that provides regulatory compliance, security testing, internal auditing, risk assessment and IT advisory services.

Last week we wrote about the value of sincere praise. But considering that no one, except maybe the offspring of a debt collector, says they want to grow up to be one, what gets people to accept a job in the industry—from an attorneys to call a center collector—before they’ve even heard those motivating words of praise? And then, besides the fact that it really is a vital, important and interesting industry in which to work, what encourages people to stay put? At The National List, we have attorney members who have worked in the industry for 20 years or more. Many of our clients have made a career out of being third-party collectors.

Effective praise goes beyond making coworkers feel good. If it’s done right, it can improve morale, motivation and productivity. But it has to be specific in order to produce those results and not come across as being insincere.

Remember when you were a child and your mother said something like, “Be good” or “You did great”? Did her words help you to know how to behave or exactly what you did that could get you the same attention again? What if your boss says “Good Job!”? Will you be able to improve your performance by doing more of the same thing that got his/her attention this time?

How would you answer if asked, “Tell us something interesting or unusual that debt collection work has taught you”? Or, “What do you enjoy most about your job in the industry?” In order to gather information about our 52 authors for the blogs published on InsideARM simultaneously with their white papers, we sent each one a questionnaire that included those questions. We thought the responses were so interesting that we want to share a few of them with you.

A new Chicago City Ordinance affecting debt collectors was announced in the May 8^th DBA International Member Alert. Effective July 1, 2013 the City of Chicago will require the licensing of debt collectors who collect on accounts against city residents. “In January, Chicago became the nation’s third municipality, after New York City and Buffalo, NY, to adopt a municipal licensing ordinance. The City of Chicago’s Department of Business Activity & Consumer Affairs recently posted information and began accepting applications for licensing.”

In the May 7 DBA International Member Alert, a change to the WA State Debt Collection Law was announced: “Earlier today, Governor Jay Inslee of Washington State signed into law House Bill 1822 that would require the licensure of debt buyers as ‘collection agencies.’ Specifically, ‘any person or entity that is engaged in the business of purchasing delinquent or charged off claims for collection purposes, whether it collects the claims itself or hires a third party for collection or an attorney for litigation in order to collect such claims’ must become licensed.”

The talk amongst all the attorneys, vendors and forwarders attending the recent, very successful NARCA Spring Conference in Las Vegas was, once again, COMPLIANCE. Everyone is taking huge steps to increase their compliance standards. It was great to hear about forwarding networks that are working together with their competitors to make compliance more convenient for their law firm members. Even during the Professional Women in the Collection Industry (PWCI) event, compliance was on everyone’s minds. One of the speakers said she was going to do everything she could “not to say the word…Shhhh… ‘compliance.’”

On April 16, The National List of Attorneys published the last paper of our ambitious project, “50 White Papers in 50 Days,” on state debt collection laws. We actually published 52 papers in 52 working days, including Washington D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands. A Bonus for our followers! A week later, we asked for feedback on how having a blog published on insideARM (they are still there under Contributors) and a white paper published on the NL website impacted the authors and the firms that wrote the papers.