About Pocket Leadz

Pocket Leadz is built by Ross McFarlane, a working mortgage broker. It exists because the problem it solves was mine first. Inquiries arrived while I was in an appointment, sat in a notification I meant to get back to, and were gone by the time I did. Everything in the product is something I needed badly enough to build, and everything written on this site is something I have actually run.

Why the guides are here

Most software companies publish articles because somebody told them content is good for search. These are here for a narrower reason. The questions that decide whether a loan officer's marketing works or quietly creates a liability are usually not the interesting ones, and they are badly served online. The rules around contacting a lead, and the rules around paying anyone who sends you one, are two of the worst served of the lot, because most of what is published about them is either written to sell something or has quietly gone out of date and never been corrected.

So the guides are the ones I wanted to be able to read. They are long, because the honest answers are not short, and they say plainly when something is unsettled rather than picking whichever version is more convenient.

How each one is researched

The rule I work to is that nothing goes on a page unless it can be traced to a primary source. For the guides that deal with US rules, that means the FCC's own orders and public notices, the Code of Federal Regulations, decisions of the federal courts, the United States Code, and the CFPB's consent orders and published guidance. Law firm commentary is used to find things and to understand them, never as the authority for a statement of fact.

Every piece then goes through a second pass whose only job is to try to break the first one. Each date, each dollar figure, each description of what a court actually held is checked again independently against the source, with the specific instruction to report problems rather than confirmations. That pass is not a formality. On the two legal guides published in September 2026 it produced fifteen corrections, two of which were statements that were simply wrong and would have misled a reader who relied on them.

Every source is then listed at the bottom of the page and linked directly, so you never have to take my word for anything. If a claim on one of these pages matters to your business, the point of that list is that you can go and read the order yourself in about ten minutes.

What these guides are not

They are not legal advice, and reading one does not create any professional relationship. I am not an attorney. The law in this area moves quickly, several of the questions covered are genuinely unsettled, and the answer for a particular arrangement usually turns on facts that a general page cannot know. When something on one of these pages bears on a real decision, take it to your compliance team or to counsel who works in that area, and use the sources list to bring them the underlying documents.

Corrections

If you find something on one of these pages that is wrong, or that has been overtaken by a change in the rules, I want to hear about it. Any of the contact routes on this site reaches me. Corrections get made rather than argued about, and the date on the page is updated when they are, so you can always see how current what you are reading actually is.

The guides

Everything published so far, with the most useful one for most people first.

The full list lives on the guides index, which is where new ones appear.