Articles by Emily Beck - Partner

Emily Beck - According to the blotter, a car dealership reported that a man using a stolen identity purchased a new car worth over $51,365 with no money down. This tasty little morsel of news really got me thinking, but left me with far more questions than answers.

One of our lawyers shared with me her recent car-buying experience. She explained that, after forwarding an e-mail containing the terms she received from the “X Organization” to the “Y Organization,” to see if the “Y Organization” could beat the “X Organization’s” price, she received an e-mail from the general sales manager of the Y Organization. As soon as this e-mail landed in her inbox, my colleague decided to cross the “Y Organization” off her list.

Here’s some free advice for folks who earn their bread in F&I. Choose your words carefully—very carefully. You may have picked up your sales spiel from the best trainer in the world or the most successful finance guy in your 20 group, but none of that will matter if your customer walks out of the box with a mixed-up idea of what role the dealership plays in the transaction.

While the Y2K phenomenon proved to be more hype than “byte,” the apocalyptic compliance frenzy that dealers face today makes Y2K look like a cake walk.

It makes me sad to hear stories about dealers who get dinged for seemingly insignificant technical violations of the law. Unfortunately, it is not unusual for us to hear about dealers who get slammed because of some error in their paperwork, or because they overlooked a change in the law.

The summer is behind you. You’ve put your hot dogs on ice and packed up your cotton candy machine. Unfortunately, your soda fountain isn’t the only thing that has run dry at your store. In fact, you haven’t seen an “up” since your last balloon shriveled up and died.

Usually a party has to sign a contract in order to be able to enforce it. It seems simple enough, right? That isn’t always the case, however, and that can be good news for parties that have some relationship to a dealer’s sale and financing agreements, even though their signatures don’t end up appearing on the bottom line.

Emily Beck - So, it always comes as a bit of a surprise to me when I hear stories about dealers who willingly turn over the keys to their dealerships to third-party sales outfits and let them take the reins and run willy-nilly through the dealership for days or weeks at a time.

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Emily Beck- It probably won’t surprise you that this issue comes up quite a bit. Unfortunately, car folks all too often use the word “warranty” to describe both service contracts and warranties. While warranties and service contracts may be similar in their scope of coverage, they have some key differences that can spell big trouble for dealers who don’t properly distinguish between the two.