What States Are Doing to Fight Junk Fees

Colin Harnsgate is an Assistant Attorney General in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office’s Consumer Protection Division.  He has been a consumer protection attorney for ten years.  Before joining the Attorney General’s Office, Colin worked in legal aid through AmeriCorps and then as a staff attorney with the Volunteer Lawyers Project in Boston, where he focused on tenants’ rights, debt collection defense, and bankruptcy.  Colin joined the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office in 2023, where his work focuses primarily on predatory debt collection practices, landlord-tenant issues, and junk fees. 

Jeremy E. Hollander, Deputy Director for the Office of Consumer Protection. Hollander oversees the Division’s primary investigative and enforcement arm, which is responsible for investigating fraud, processing and investigating consumer complaints, enforcing the Consumer Fraud Act and related state statutes, and registering and overseeing New Jersey’s regulated businesses, charitable organizations, and legalized games of chance. Previously, Hollander served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Division of Law’s Affirmative Civil Enforcement Practice Group, where he prosecuted violations of the Consumer Fraud Act and matters before the state’s professional and occupational boards. Before joining State government in 2018, Hollander practiced law as an associate in the Litigation Department of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in New York. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Deborah L. Cook of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Akron, Ohio. Hollander earned his B.A. and M.A. from Boston University and his J.D. from New York Law School.

Ariel Nelson is a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) focusing on credit reporting, tenant and employment screening, consumer protections for renters, and consumer issues affecting justice-involved people and their families. She directs NCLC’s Criminal Justice Debt & Reintegration Project. Prior to working at NCLC, Ariel investigated and litigated administrative and environmental law cases as a staff attorney/clinical teaching fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. She also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Judge David O. Carter of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and to the Honorable Judge Dorothy W. Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.