John Peterson

John Peterson generally handles a wide variety of litigation, including health care, real estate, corporate and privacy cases. The Nashville attorney even represents the brother and sister of the late criminal defense attorney Barry Tarlow in a probate dispute in Los Angeles.

Lately, he has been concentrating on litigation involving credit card transactions and fees. That’s because Peterson and his firm are the lead trial counsel for the financial technology services company Fiserv Inc. “We have 35 to 50 cases going for it at any given time,” he said.

One of the company’s main services is to process credit and debit card charges between merchants and the Visa and Mastercard systems. It does that for Wells Fargo, so now Peterson is defending the bank in a brand-new privacy class action.

The lawsuit alleges that outside companies soliciting merchants for Wells Fargo card services are secretly recording their phone calls in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act. Miller v. Wells Fargo Bank N.A., 3:23-cv-06265, (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 4, 2023).

The act sets statutory damages at $5,000 per violation, so the case has “a large potential liability damages number,” he said.

He was brought in recently to represent Fiserv subsidiary TeleCheck in an ongoing contract suit against Walmart in Montana. The plaintiff alleges signs at registers about redepositing bounced checks mislead customers about the number of NSF fees banks can charge them. Morris v. Walmart, 1:22-cv-00016 (D. Mont., filed Feb. 23, 2022).

“Our position is that sign [by the registers] is just a disclosure of what we’re going to do if your check bounces. It’s not an agreement,” he said.

In what may be his most important pending case, Peterson goes to trial on March 1 in Washington state court representing Fiserv subsidiary First Data Merchant Services in litigation against the Washington Department of Revenue. “It’s a case that could essentially change how credit card processing is done nationwide by all carriers,” he said.

According to Peterson, the revenue department collects a small business and occupation tax on every participant in a chain of financial transactions. It is seeking to impose that tax on First Data for the interchange fee banks take out of credit card purchases.

He argues that his client’s only role is to transfer transaction information from merchants to Visa or Mastercard and then distribute funds to the merchants. “They never receive the interchange fee,” Peterson said. “They never receive an amount related to it, and they have nothing to do with the services that the issuing bank provides.”

If the tax is enforced, “it will increase the processing costs for every merchant across the country,” he said.

— Don DeBenedictis