Not every FCRA misstep is a federal case. In Dreher v. Experian Information Solutions, Inc., 856 F.3d 337 (4th Cir. 2017), the Fourth Circuit applied Spokeo and dismantled a class judgment reported at $11.7 million — a cautionary tale that shapes how careful lawyers build FCRA cases in Maryland today.
The facts
Michael Dreher's Experian file disclosures listed a defunct bank, Advanta, as the "source" of a tradeline, when the account was actually being serviced by CardWorks. The information about the account itself was substantively available to him; the complaint was that the wrong corporate name appeared as the source. A class was certified and judgment entered.
The holding
The Fourth Circuit vacated for lack of standing:
"Thus, the harm Dreher alleges he suffered is not the type of harm Congress sought to prevent when it enacted the FCRA."
"Because Dreher has failed to demonstrate he has suffered a concrete injury sufficient to satisfy Article III standing, the district court's judgment is vacated, and this class action must be dismissed on jurisdictional grounds."
Dreher had the information he needed; he could not point to any real-world consequence of the source-name error.
The lesson — for both sides
Dreher is often waved around by defendants as though it doomed consumer FCRA cases. It did no such thing. It doomed harmless claims. Cases built on denied credit, lost jobs, higher interest rates, clearance complications, wasted hours, and documented distress sail past Dreher — as the affirmed verdicts in Johnson, Saunders, Sloane, and Robinson show. What Dreher punishes is pleading a statutory slip with no story of harm attached.
That is why our intake process focuses relentlessly on consequences: who saw the error, what it cost you, what it did to your life. If you have that story, this circuit will hear it.