Ex-CFPB Leaders Launch Law Firm to Fight Financial Abuses
Three former senior enforcement leaders from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have launched a public interest law firm that will focus on consumer rights, tenant rights, workers’ rights and civil rights.
Eric Halperin, Cara Petersen and Tara Mikkilineni led a CFPB team that secured orders for $9.5 billion in penalties and payments to consumers between 2021 and 2025, according to a Tuesday (July 14) press release.
Now, as founding partners of the law firm Halperin Petersen & Mikkilineni LLP (HPM), they will focus on issues such as predatory lending, illegal junk fees, deceptive schemes, unlawful evictions, discriminatory housing practices, wage theft, illegal misclassification, invasive monitoring programs, algorithmic wage-setting and discriminatory lending, per the release.
Halperin said in the release: “We believe litigation is critical to pushing back against corporate abuse.”
Petersen said in the release: “We are proud to take up the fight to defend working people.”
Mikkilineni said in the release: “Consumer rights, civil rights and workers’ rights are all under attack, and HPM will use every tool available to stop this onslaught in its tracks.”
It was reported in June 2025 that Petersen resigned from her post as acting enforcement director of the CFPB and said that the CFPB leadership under President Donald Trump “has no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way.”
Petersen’s resignation came months after the CFPB’s enforcement and supervision chiefs stepped down amid the administration’s push to dismantle the agency, the report said.
Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Halperin and Mikkilineni also departed the CFPB shortly after Trump began his second term.
Mikkilineni said in the report that algorithmic wage-setting is an example of the technology-powered financial abuses that will be among the issues that the new law firm will focus on.
“We saw old school predatory financial models morph into a particular set of technologies, and I think they’re going to go through another morphing now that AI can make all of that more powerful, more seamless, and frankly less transparent to the consumer,” Mikkilineni said. “It seems unlikely that the federal government will be doing a lot of intervention in that area.”
