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MA Debt
Collection Court Cases
As the Tech PM on BU Spark! project for Spring '24's CS506, I was initially tasked with overseeing three teams, who analyzed Massachussets' Civil and Small Claim court cases by identifying debt cases, as well as key litigators.
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As I continued wrapping up the work over the summer, I worked on building a dashboard for an individual debt collector - Andrew Metcalf. The findings from students and mine eventually helped the client add statistics to her GBH article, to read more, click here.
Here are some key takeaways for the individual debt collector Metcalf:
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1. Metcalf as Plaintiff: Metcalf has filed 1,827 cases since 2017, primarily through his companies Judgment Acquisitions Unlimited and Champion Funding, Inc. The cases were filed in 62 different district courts and all eight of Boston Municipal Courts, with Stoughton having the most cases among District Courts at 137. Among all 1.8k cases, almost 90% were in Small Claims courts. Additionally, there is a higher percentage of disposed Small Claims cases than Civil cases, 39.6% for Small Claims vs. 13.3% for Civil, possibly due to the lower amounts associated with the cases.
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2. Metcalf as Defendant: Metcalf and his companies have been sued in seven cases since 2017. Among these seven cases, five were in Civil court, indicating a larger amount of money associated with these cases. Other companies that were also sued in these cases are ‘Merriman Investments, LLC’, ‘Massachusetts Constables Office’.
Below is the SQL query that I executed in Python enviroment that connected to the WordPress database: