Sloppy Lender Lawyers Making False Statements Running Rampant In C. Florida Foreclosures? Chief Judge To Recruit Law Students To Review Court Files

In Central Florida, the Sarasota Herald Tribune reports:

• Foreclosure lawyers want to take back property as fast as possible, and sometimes they do not let the facts slow them down. In case after case, lawyers representing banks are giving false statements in court about who owns mortgages, or whether the homeowner is willing to negotiate, or whether they have completed all the legal steps to put a foreclosed house back on the market.

• The errors and fabrications in the court files are seldom caught by judges with hundreds of foreclosure cases before them.(1) The judges say they can only hope to catch a few of the offending lawyers in hopes of keeping the rest honest. The courts usually rely on defendants to point out problems in the cases against them.

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• Nobody knows how common it is for foreclosure cases to be based on untrue statements or incomplete proof. More than half of all foreclosure defendants simply walk away, and never show up in court to defend themselves.

• A Sarasota attorney, Richard Kessler, enlisted a few friends to go through 180 foreclosure cases in Sarasota County looking for errors. They found three out of four cases proceeded with incomplete or improper documentation. For instance, the survey found that only one in 12 cases had the documents to prove the company foreclosing on the property was also the company holding the mortgage note. In half of the cases reviewed, the plaintiff said the mortgage note had been lost.

• Kessler contacted [Florida's 12th Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Lee] Haworth and offered to have his business double check the paperwork for the courts, proposing that his fee could be charged to the company filing the case. Haworth declined, saying he cannot add such a filing fee, and the courts have no money to pay for the service.

• Instead, Haworth is recruiting volunteer law students to review all the cases for foreclosure judges this summer to verify documents. "We think having cops on the beat will help," Haworth said.

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• A judge in Miami fined Wells Fargo bank $95,000 late last year because of sloppy paperwork filed by Florida Default Law Group, one of a handful of companies that handle the majority of foreclosures in the state. Judge John K. Olson blasted Florida Default, saying the firm seemed to believe that "filing any old pleading without undertaking any investigation into its accuracy is perfectly acceptable practice."

For more, see Lies a new tool in foreclosure (Lawyers, in rush to regain properties, can exploit judges' workload).

Go here for other posts on sloppy foreclosures and assembly line lawyering.

For posts that reference the failure of mortgage lenders and their attorneys to file the proper paperwork when bringing foreclosure actions, Go Here, Go Here, Go Here, Go Here, Go Here, Go Here, and Go Here.

(1) In one case cited in the article, minutes after a foreclosure attorney told her everything was in order in a recent case, Circuit Judge Donna Berlin was ready to sign off. Then she happened to glance at the file, and realized that the two properties were in Miami, a few hundred miles outside her jurisdiction. "I didn't have time to go through and read it," Berlin told a group of attorneys at a meeting last weekend. "And it was not something that I normally look at." SloppyForeclosuresAlpha EpsilonMissingDocsMtg