The New York Times has a pattern (see here, here, and here for previous examples) of publishing news articles describing things as "largely unregulated" or "lightly regulated." Often that's inaccurate and just a way for the Times to insert its editorial opinion advocating for increased regulation. The latest example of this comes on today's front page, in an article about companies trying to make money by guiding NFL players through a head-injury settlement process:
The cottage industry of companies and law firms, going by names such as N.F.L. Case Consulting, Concussion Case Management and Legacy Pro Sports and looking to help people file settlement claims, is largely unregulated, even if their pitches are for services that are usually unnecessary.
The Times claims that these firms are "largely unregulated." Yet later in the article, it reports:
In February, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, sued a New Jersey-based financial company, RD Legal Funding L.L.C., accusing it of deceiving retired N.F.L. players and "luring them into costly advances on settlement payouts with lies about the terms of the deals."
So it turns out that far from being "largely unregulated," this industry is in fact subject to regulation at both the federal level — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the Times got the name of the agency incorrect, rendering it inaccurately as "Finance' rather than "Financial") — and at the state level, by the attorney general. In addition, lawyers are regulated by states, bar associations, and courts, and can be sanctioned or disbarred for misconduct. In fact, lawyers and even apparently sketchy contingency-fee fly-by-night class-action "consultants" are both subject to more heavy regulation than is the largely unregulated industry of journalism, where reporters and editors can pull nonsense like this without any chance of being punished by a government agency for it — in fact, with explicit First Amendment guarantees against any such consequences.