Stephen F. Hayes

In December 2020, Upstart Network (“Upstart”), the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (“LDF”), and the Student Borrower Protection Center (“SBPC”) entered into an agreement to appoint Relman Colfax to serve as an independent fair lending Monitor to evaluate and make recommendations regarding the fair lending implications of Upstart’s lending platform, and to issue a series of periodic reports on its findings and recommendations.

Led by Megan Cacace, Relman Colfax conducted a two-year Civil Rights Audit of Facebook along with civil rights and civil liberties leader Laura Murphy.  Megan and the Relman Colfax team provided analysis on the civil rights implications of the company’s policies and practices, and recommendations for improvement, and documented their findings in three public reports.

In 2013, in the first reverse redlining case filed against a for-profit school in the country for engaging in deceptive practices to encourage low-income African-American students to take out large federal student loans for an education that the school knew was inadequate, the firm obtained a $5 million settlement for a class of over 4,000 members. 

This First Amendment and race discrimination case challenged a county government’s dismissal of three doctors who were outspoken opponents of budget cuts that impacted a public hospital serving the predominantly African-American population on the south side of Chicago.