My name is Doug Beaton, and for the last twenty-eight years, I’ve practiced consumer law with offices in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. But I wasn’t born that way!
Instead, I grew up mostly in the suburban Boston city of Melrose, where I loved to play baseball, hockey, and later, woodwinds in the high school band.
I graduated from Melrose High School with honors and was lucky enough to get to go to Tufts University for college. To help pay for it, I took out some student loans. True story: in the high-inflation early ’80s, I actually borrowed extra amounts, put the excess in a Fidelity account that was paying 22% interest, and made money off my student loans! I though those days were gone forever, but they may be coming back.
With my bachelor’s degree I went looking for jobs in the local computer industry (which was booming back then). After about ten years of software wars, I kind of saw the writing on the wall, and decided to bail for law school.
I spent three years at Northeastern’s law school in Boston, which requires all students to work at several co-op jobs to gain practical legal experience. Two of mine were at the Federal Defender Office in Boston and the New Hampshire public defender’s office in Nashua. Right away I was investigating some big cases and even handling a few little cases on my own!
So I went back to Northeastern, took the evidence course, hit the exam out of the park, and decided on what my next career was.
It wasn’t long before I started getting clients who had problems with their driver’s licenses.
In those days, fixing the problems was easy. If they had been out of school for seven years, I would just point them to bankruptcy court, and Presto! …. the loans went away.
Then things began to change. First came the requirement that you had to go through a lawsuit to discharge federal student loans. Then the level of proof required to win these suits got tougher. Then, the coup-de-grace: in 2005 these tough new laws were applied to private student loans, too.
About this time, I started to look for ways to help student loan borrowers that didn’t require bankruptcy. At first, there wasn’t much available, but the good news is more and more programs started coming on-line as the sheer volume of student loan debt in America spiraled upwards. I realized that if I was going to be able to help parents and graduates in this new environment, I’d have to study the new regulations closely. So I set out to learn all ins and outs — the little tricks — of every student loan repayment and forgiveness program.
Today’s borrowers face almost the opposite problem of those in the ’80s and ’90s — there’s plenty of relief out there if you know where to look, but the good stuff is buried in an alphabet soup of acronyms that becomes bewildering quickly. That’s where I can help.
Since 1994 I’ve been helping people to get out of student debt both with and without the bankruptcy code. It’s a good feeling to know that I can use this law to help rebuild people’s lives, whereas many other legal specialties are only good for tearing people apart.
If you have student loan problems and would like the help of a lawyer that not only knows his field, but enjoys working with people to get them out of debt, by all means give me a call.