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Brian Shearer is the Legal Director of Justice Catalyst, a nonprofit organization and public interest law firm that uses path-breaking approaches to social justice lawyering that have real-world impact and improve the lives of those denied access to justice. Justice Catalyst works with non-profits and plaintiffs’ firms to build class action and impact cases that advance economic justice, including the recently filed class action asserting that the California commercial bail bond industry has been fixing prices for bail bonds for years. Prior to coming to Justice Catalyst, Brian worked for 7 years at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), where he worked on a wide variety of consumer protection issues but focused on student loans, debt collection, payday lending, UDAP, and administrative law. Brian wrote the “larger participant” rule establishing the CFPB’s supervisory authority over student loan servicers, and he stood-up the CFPB’s nonbank student loan servicer supervision program by leading the first exams and writing the CFPB’s examination manual. In 2017, Brian was CFPB Director Cordray’s Senior Advisor on all policy issues and he was instrumental in writing and leading the effort to issue the final payday lending rule. Brian has a J.D. from American University Washington College of Law and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California. He is admitted to practice law in Virginia.