While the media is giving lots of coverage to the fifth anniversary of the CFPB, I thought it appropriate to commemorate the fifth anniversary of our blog, which was launched on July 21, 2011, the same day the Bureau was stood up.  

When the Dodd-Frank Act was signed into law one year earlier, it had 16 titles. But we focused principally on Titles X and XIV, the two that created and applied to the CFPB.  We recognized right from the start that the CFPB was going to have an enormous impact on the consumer financial services industry and the lawyers who counsel members of that industry. We needed to find a way to deliver information on breaking developments in real time. The only way to do that was with a blog. And I wanted it to be 100% devoted to the CFPB. Law firm blogs were a rarity then. So while it felt like uncharted waters, we determined that it was a risk worth taking.

We envisioned that our blog would be one place where a reader could go to get up-to-the-minute information about CFPB developments, but we also felt that we needed to do more than simply report the news.  With our vast experience in the consumer financial services area, we were uniquely positioned to closely analyze developments and tell our readers the significance of the developments.

We’ve come a long way since those early days. Our blog reports and analyzes all public developments at the CFPB, except for those involving clients.  Sometimes, we even break news. Over the course of five years, we have published many hundreds of blog entries. Our practice is home to lawyers with experience in so many corners of the market – enforcement, compliance, student lending, auto lending, privacy and data security, credit cards…the list goes on and on. Each team member lends his or her voice to our blog and makes it a more complete news source than it ever could be with a single author. For four years in a row we have been named by the ABA as a “Top 100 Law Blawg.”  We have thousands of subscribers, including many officials at the CFPB and members of the news media.

I am so proud of this blog, and so thankful for the efforts of our CFPBMonitor team. But most of all, I’m grateful to our readers, who lend us their insight and keep the conversation going on issues of such importance to those of us in the industry. Thank you!