Monday, February 23, 2009

Traveling Foreclosure Defense Seminar Featuring Florida Legal Aid Attorney To Make "Broadway Debut" Next Month

The New York Post recently ran a story on Florida foreclosure defense attorney April Charney from Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, who is traveling the country spreading the word on a well publicized strategy(1) for hammering mortgage lenders and loan servicers in foreclosure actions.
  • [C]harney has held seminars in Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina and throughout Florida to educate lawyers on how to implement the courtroom defense. [...] She is scheduled to [...] hold her first New York seminar next month.

For the story, see THE LOAN RANGER (Lawyer Outwits Banks In Foreclosure Battles).

Go here for a diagram of the complicated, convoluted mortgage securitization process that is now making it difficult for foreclosing entities to prove they actually own the promissory notes.

(1) According to the story, she asserts that the loan servicers bringing most of the foreclosure actions in the country don't own the mortgages and have no standing to take away a person's home. The strategy has spread virally around the country and now thousands of foreclosure lawsuits are sitting idly - in legal limbo. "I have one case from 2004 where the bank has not returned to court and where my client now has deposited more money into a trust account than the house is worth," Charney noted. The legal issue is that banks turn the mortgages into bonds, which are put into trusts, like collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. The bank "sells" the CDOs the right to collect the revenue stream but, according to Charney, not the right of ownership of the loan/promissory note itself. ThetaMissingDocsMtg