South Carolina

Amber Fulmer: Welcome y’all to the Direct Examination Podcast. My name is Amber Fulmer.

Joseph Bias: And I’m Joseph Bias. Amber, how are you, and how’s the pea in the pod?

Amber Fulmer: I am doing well! The pea is growing. She punched and/or kicked me for the first time on Saturday! (laughs) Yeah, made me fly out of the bed! I was like, “What was that?!” I had no idea what it was.

Joseph Bias: You were possessed, and you were like, “What’s going on here?”

Amber Fulmer: That’s what it felt like! She makes her presence known when she has a problem with something! (laughs)

Joseph Bias: So a future lawyer is what you’re saying, then!

Amber Fulmer: Probably!

Joseph Bias: Absolutely. Good luck with that! You do not hear the dulcet tones of Dane’s voice this evening or this morning, whenever you’re listening.

Amber Fulmer: He’s like the lullaby! It’s so soothing!

Joseph Bias: When Dane’s voice comes on, we already talked about what happens to people who listen. So I know that some folks are definitely missing his voice. Don’t worry, he’s okay. He had a fire he needed to put out, and so, you know, Amber and I will just do our best to try and make up for his presence.

Amber Fulmer: Try so hard to entertain y’all.

Joseph Bias: That’s right! The things we do for our love of you all! So because we love you guys, you guys can show us love back by going to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you’re listening to this podcast, give us a 5-star rating, write us a nice review, and again, if it’s a mean review, just email that to Dane directly so that he can see it and blame him, because obviously if something’s wrong with this podcast, it’s because Dane isn’t here!

Amber Fulmer: Right! He’s in absentia, he took the brunt of this on his shoulders, whether he knows it or not!

Joseph Bias: That’s what he signed up for! Sorry, Dane. Speaking of Dane, Amber, I know that you weren’t here last week, but you downloaded and you listened, so you heard that Dane has agreed that if he gets selected as Best DUI Attorney or Law Firm by FreeTimes.com, that he will do this podcast in a sash and tiara!

Amber Fulmer: Which is perfect because, as a former beauty pageant participant, I have plenty of sashes and tiaras! We’re going to have to modify the sash to say, instead of “Miss Panther” or “Miss Sportrama,” you know, we’re going to have to change it up a little bit!

Joseph Bias: How many sashes do you have?!

Amber Fulmer: Too many! (laughs) I can bring them in, we have several crowns to choose from, trophies…

Joseph Bias: That is perhaps… now that we know that you are a die-hard fan of The Golden Girls…

Amber Fulmer: Oh, yes!

Joseph Bias: …that you apparently have a private plane, and that now you have every sash that was ever given out in the Batesburg-Leesville area, every week we learn something new about Amber and I’m here for it!

Amber Fulmer: Just a colorful little jewel unearthed right here in Batesburg! (laughs)

Joseph Bias: Now, that being said, to go on a negative note, Amber, we haven’t talked about this, and frankly on our podcast notes it says, “This is the time for Joseph to rant.”

Amber Fulmer: Yeah, I’m just going to let Joseph have this one!

Joseph Bias: Yeah, so, you know, we’ve done a lot for the Columbia community, as you know, Amber. We have made an impact, we… I don’t want to say that we’re the best podcast that has to deal with South Carolina law ever, but I mean, we’re certainly the only ones, so that means something! As you know, we had this campaign to be in the Columbia Free Times “Power 50.” We were not selected. Yes, now I don’t know who to blame specifically, but Dane isn’t here! So that’s all I’m going to say! So when I see Dane, he won’t look like the same as when y’all see Dane. But yeah, Free Times, we’re going to be looking out for that next year. Like I said, I don’t even want to be in the Power 50, I want to be in the Honorable Mentions! Amber shows up here in her sashes and tiaras because she’s a winner, and now because of the Free Times, we aren’t a winner anymore! And what’s even worse is that Mike Tasky didn’t make the list this year either! Oh no, I feel like we brought him down too! So, ball’s in your court next year to fix this wrong that you’ve done us!

We have kept our guest waiting for too long. I appreciate her and you all listening to me. Amber, we have a fantastic guest today, tell us about her.

Amber Fulmer: We do! Our guest today is Senior Staff Attorney and Consumer Law Unit Head for South Carolina Legal Services. Her practice is devoted to consumer protection law, and she’s been the past chair of the Bar’s Consumer Law Section. She’s a Clemson alum—we won’t hold that against you! (laughs)—and a University of South Carolina School of Law graduate. She majored in History and French…

Joseph Bias: That’s a heck of a combination!

Amber Fulmer: That is incredible! And she has been in practice in Greenville, South Carolina since 1982. She’s also a member of the South Carolina Women’s Lawyers Association and the National Association of Consumer Advocates as the State Chair for South Carolina. She has her own podcast, Think Like a Lawyer Thursday, which can be found at anchor.fm/susan-ingles, and also for South Carolina Legal Services where she works, they have online classes that you can access at learnthelaw.org. So we are proud and happy that our guest today is Miss Susan Ingles!

Joseph Bias: Susan, thanks for joining us!

Susan Ingles: Thanks for having me, you guys! I’m excited to be on your show.

Joseph Bias: You are ticking off some important boxes for us. The first is that we’ve never had anybody talk about consumer protection law before, and we’ve never had anybody from Greenville before! So you are our representative for both, so congratulations!

Susan Ingles: Wow, I’m a first in two ways, I like it!

Joseph Bias: Susan, can you tell us a little bit about… so we have a lot of lawyers who listen and law students who listen. When we talk about consumer law or consumer protection law, what are we talking about?

Susan Ingles: Yeah, and you know, consumer protection law in South Carolina really is a little bit of an underserved area when it comes to plaintiffs and the kind of people that certainly we represent here at legal aid and consumers. There’s a good definition that I like about consumer law—I can’t remember it exactly, but it goes something like: consumer law is the purchasing and financing of goods and services, and the collection of that debt, and the reporting on your credit. So for us, consumer protection law includes bankruptcy, foreclosure defense, debt collection, warranty law, contracts, all those sorts of things that come within the purview of just the financing of products that you buy.

And so that’s what we see it as. And of course, as you know, we have a South Carolina Consumer Protection Code, which is a terrific piece of law, but there’s also other laws like the Dealers and Distributors Act and the Unfair Trade Practices Act, which we use all three of those state laws a lot. And then it includes all the federal laws like the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and just a myriad of federal laws.

Joseph Bias: So when we were all studying for the Bar and we were all dreading the UCC section and saying, “Oh my gosh, I’m not going to become a lawyer because of the secured transactions section,” these are the things that are your baby that you actually specialize in!

Susan Ingles: Yeah, and for the law students out there, I can tell you those were not my best subjects! (laughs)

Joseph Bias: Okay, so they weren’t ours either! I guarantee you they weren’t ours! (laughs)

Joseph Bias: You actually had a unique path into consumer protection law. You started in private practice and then went to legal aid?

Susan Ingles: Yeah, you know, I was kind of the reverse person because most often you think of new, younger attorneys maybe right out of law school coming to work at legal aid. We have a lot of terrific young attorneys here that I’m so excited to have and the work that they are doing. But then quite often they move on to private practice at some point later in their career. Not always, lot of people stay in public interest law. But that’s, I think, kind of the standard way you think about legal aid attorneys. For me, I was in private practice for I think about 22 years before I came to legal aid. So it was a totally different path for me. I loved being in private practice, but being at legal aid has been a wonderful experience, and it’s given me the opportunity to really focus on the consumer law area.

Joseph Bias: When you’re talking about consumer law as far as legal services, if someone’s listening who may qualify for legal services or is interested in these services, what types of things can legal services help indigent South Carolinians with?

Susan Ingles: Anything having to do with loans, installment purchases, claim and delivery, repossession of cars and mobile homes, credit disputes, any kind of predatory lending issues. We get a lot of debt collection cases. In fact, I had one recently… lots of times I think there’s an attitude that consumers owe a debt simply because the creditor says they do, whether it’s a credit card or car debt, whatever it is. I had a client recently who swore up and down that this had been a fraudulent situation with a credit card, that her credit card had been paid off, but they had sued her for the debt. Typically, people just don’t respond to that and the creditor gets a default judgment. But we try to help people with that because quite often they have defenses. Sometimes it’s simply on the amount, but sometimes it’s maybe not their debt or some other defense or counterclaim.

For this lady, there was a fraud situation, and sure enough, because we helped her and defended her, the company determined that a large portion of what they were saying she owed, they waived because it was a result of fraud. Had she not had the representation to bring that up, then they would have just gotten a default judgment and gone along on their merry way and tried to pursue collection of the judgment. So there’s all kinds of ways that we can help people, and I just think sometimes there’s a misconception about consumers that there’s just this automatic presumption that they owe a debt simply because some robo-signing employee signs an affidavit that says they do.

Amber Fulmer: Well, Susan, one of the things in your intro that we hit on were these online classrooms through learnthelaw.org. Could you talk a little bit more about that for us?

Susan Ingles: Oh, yeah! I am so excited about these online classrooms. We were able to get a Technology Innovation Grant from the Legal Services Corporation to create these classrooms. They’re really targeted in two different ways: one is for people who may need to be representing themselves or just need to be educated that they have some legal rights in a particular area, and then also for attorneys who might be wanting to or willing to take a pro bono case, but the typical kinds of cases that we see with our clients are not standard practice for a lot of attorneys. But most attorneys can take a case, learn about that particular kind of case, and go to court no problem.

And so this is what we’re trying to do with the online classrooms—to give attorneys a way to easily understand the subject matter, check a list of what you need to do for court for a client, and just make it easier to be a pro bono volunteer.

Joseph Bias: And those topics on learnthelaw.org are debt collection defense, getting a landlord to make repairs, unemployment benefits appeals, the ABCs of guardianship, filing for an order of protection, and debt collection defense in summary court. Those are all things that I wouldn’t even know how to navigate myself without the help of an attorney!

Susan Ingles: Yeah, and the response from attorneys who have looked at them, they say, “Hey, I think I could do one of those!” And the neat thing too is that all of the classrooms start out with basically a cartoon!

Joseph Bias: That’s on my level, okay, I got you! (laughs)

Susan Ingles: It works for all of us! But yeah, we hired a group called LawHud and they helped us create this animated character and put him into these short videos—they’re maybe 3 to 5 minutes. They just very simply tell you about these subjects that you just listed. We have shown those to some attorney groups, and for example, the “Getting Your Landlord to Make Repairs” is so easy, you just watch the video and think, “Oh, okay, I get that! I could hold somebody’s hand through one of those hearings!” So we love the cartoon character and it’s really inspired us to do some more of these. I think it’s really going to become a series where we do other subjects that we see a lot of that we think people need to know their rights on, but that also pro bono attorneys could really help us out with.

Amber Fulmer: Do you have any topics that you could share with us that might be up and coming in the future?

Susan Ingles: Well, we actually are just about to go into working on a series of videos related to disaster relief. So we’re excited about that. There are actually some videos that have already been done about FEMA and FEMA appeals and things like that, and so we’ll take our character, who we call Clark, and he’ll be sort of the character in these videos. One of the things that we’re thinking of doing with the disaster-related videos is to include a video where the audience is first responders—like how to identify legal issues for the people that you’re trying to assist, so not just their FEMA claims, but other things that come up.

Joseph Bias: Susan, you, like we said, have the honor of being our first Greenville-based guest. We’ve had Rock Hill, Charleston, Columbia… if you were pitching the Greenville Bar—pitching living and working in Greenville to an attorney or law student considering moving there—tell us about what it’s like to work in Greenville and in the Greenville Bar.

Susan Ingles: I do recommend it! Of course, I grew up here, but Greenville is a great place to live and work. It’s been really moving along in probably the last 20 years, I would say. As you may know, our downtown area is beautiful, there’s so much to do. We have the baseball field up here at the Greenville Drive stadium, we also now have a soccer team, the Greenville Triumph, and they’re doing fantastic right near our downtown area. So between all the restaurants, the sports, business… we have the Clemson ONE building downtown where my daughter is getting her MBA. So there’s just all kinds of stuff going on in Greenville—breweries and all the things that young people love! Now, it’s hard to find a house here because so many people are moving to Greenville, but it can be done!

And you know, the Greenville Bar is terrific. I’ve been a member of the Greenville Bar for something like 36 years! It’s been terrific. I can see all the new attorneys that are coming in now, all the ones of course that are in my generation, but then also all the older ones who were so wonderful to me when I was first starting out. It’s a great group, very collegial and always has been. We’ve got over 1,200 lawyers in Greenville.

Joseph Bias: Before we move on to our next topic, best show you’ve seen at the Peace Center in Greenville?

Susan Ingles: Hamilton, for sure!

Amber Fulmer: Oh, yeah! That’s a good one!

Susan Ingles: You know, I do want to give one other shout-out on the Greenville Bar because we have a Greenville Bar Pro Bono Foundation now, and Legal Aid has been working with that group to refer cases to pro bono attorneys. Since February of last year, they’ve done 122 pro bono cases just here in Greenville, and there’s 166 volunteers. So that’s a great number, we really appreciate the work that they do!

Joseph Bias: That’s awesome!

Amber Fulmer: Susan, as fellow podcasters, we are so excited to have someone on here that has their own podcast! Tell us a little bit about the Think Like a Lawyer Thursday podcast. I love how that’s titled, by the way.

Susan Ingles: Okay, well, you know, I started getting into the whole technology and social media world probably three or four years ago. All of my children are adults now, but they were all very involved with that, and so I decided that I needed to stay up with the times, so to speak, and be knowledgeable about that. And of course now you see so many states with rules about being competent when it comes to technology. I wanted to try to stay relevant in my older years! (laughs)

So I started doing Twitter and live streaming every now and then, but then one of my colleagues at Legal Services, Jack Cohoon, who y’all may know over at our office in Columbia, he said, “Hey, have you heard of this Anchor platform?” He said you can do a three-minute little podcast. And he said that’s a great way for us to get information out there to people. I thought, “Well, I think I could do three minutes!” (laughs)

And so that’s how I got started with it. When I was in college and about to go to law school was when The Paper Chase was a big deal, the movie and the TV show. And so I used that phrase that Professor Kingsfield said at the beginning and end of each podcast: “You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer!” (laughs) So that’s always been a fun way for me to start and end the podcast. The three-minute thing developed to where you could then do five minutes, and now you can do it as long as you want, it’s a full-fledged podcast platform. When I had my 50th episode, I promoted these Learn the Law classrooms and our character Clark. I even did a “12 Days of Christmas” series taking subjects in consumer law that had those numbers associated with them, and that was a lot of fun! Hopefully it’s helpful to educate not just lawyers, but people in general about consumer law and their rights.

Joseph Bias: And the website for that is anchor.fm/susan-ingles. If you have questions about consumer law, whether you’re a lawyer or someone dealing with one of those topics, Susan is over 50 episodes in explaining those topics!

Susan Ingles: Tune in! (laughs) But I appreciate y’all’s show, it’s been great to listen to Direct Examination and have some fellow podcasters!

Joseph Bias: Well, Susan, that’s probably because we aren’t smart enough to talk for three minutes on a topic, so we have smart people come in and talk for us! (laughs)

Susan Ingles: Well, I thought I would run out of subjects on consumer law, but I haven’t yet!

Joseph Bias: Well, we’re two seasons in and we aren’t where you are yet, but hopefully we’ll keep plugging along! As you know, we do two different things in the summer. For law students studying for the Bar, we ask our guests to give one sentence of Bar exam advice. What would you say?

Susan Ingles: You know, my tip is as much for after you’ve taken the Bar as for when you’re studying for it, but I think that you have to to some degree be in your own little world of studying for it to really focus on what you’re doing and kind of keep the nerves down. And then, once it’s over, people want to ask each other, “Oh, what was this question, what’d you put for that?” And then you’re just knocking your anxiety level up even more when you should be able to relax! So I’ll say once you’ve taken it, just let that be it, and hopefully you’ve done your best and passed.

Amber Fulmer: No need to worry about it then, you’ve got to wait months anyway!

Susan Ingles: But I love the newfangled study aids, those are great! My daughter has a friend who just passed the Bar, and I was around her several times and she was just doing test questions on her phone! Wish we had had that! Of course, a lot more is expected of you when you have those extra study aids, maybe!

Amber Fulmer: Susan, this is the next part of our podcast where we get to know a little bit more about you. This season it’s war stories! Tell us your best war story that you’ve had while being an attorney.

Susan Ingles: You know, it’s hard after 36 years to just have one! But I did have what I call a “Verdict” moment—I don’t know if y’all have seen that movie The Verdict with Paul Newman?

Joseph Bias: I haven’t!

Susan Ingles: The jury comes back and says to the judge, “Can we give the plaintiff more than she asked for?” (laughs) And that’s one of the big lines in the movie! Early in my career, I had a case where the jury came back and said, “Can we give the plaintiffs more than they asked for?!” And of course they couldn’t, it was a set amount of depreciation in a reverse condemnation case, so it was not a situation where they could just give any amount of money for damages. The opposing attorney turned to me as they were filing out and said, “I think I saw that in a movie!” (laughs) Early in my career, that was of course really exciting.

Two other quick ones: I had a breach of warranty case on an emu!

Amber Fulmer: An emu?!

Joseph Bias: Like an ostrich bird type?!

Susan Ingles: Like an ostrich-type bird, an emu! Had a client who bought an emu and the day after he received it, it died!

Amber Fulmer: Oh, that’s unfortunate!

Susan Ingles: You know, sometimes you have to learn about stuff when you’re doing litigation! I had to learn about emus! (laughs)

And then the awful story is, I had a case where… you just don’t know what you need to tell your client sometimes, and one of them is: COME TO COURT THE SECOND DAY OF TRIAL! I had a client, we started the trial, and they did not show up for the second day!

Amber Fulmer: Oh! They thought they just had to be there the first day!

Susan Ingles: It was going quite well until… the client didn’t show up! (laughs) But the wonderful thing about having cell phones and all now is you can call your fellow lawyers and say, “What do you do when your client doesn’t show up for court day two of the trial?!”

Joseph Bias: Stop crying, I suppose! (laughs) Susan, thank you so much for joining us! If you’re listening to us today, if you want some more information about the consumer law stuff that Susan is great at, you can go to her podcast at anchor.fm/susan-ingles, you can go to the online classrooms at learnthelaw.org, and you can follow Susan herself on Twitter and Instagram @InglesAngle!

You can follow us @SCLawPod on Twitter and Facebook, follow me @JosephPBias, follow Dane and vote for him as Best DUI Attorney at FreeTimes.com, follow Dane @SCCrimLawyer, and Amber @RedJudicata. Susan, thank you so much for joining us!

Susan Ingles: Hey, you guys, it was great talking to you, come on up to Greenville sometime!

Joseph Bias: Absolutely! So for Susan, for Dane who will hopefully be back, for Amber and the pea in the pod, we will see you next week on Direct Examination!