Punishing Attorneys Offering Bogus Loan Modification Help To Financially Strapped Homeowners A Priority For Incoming State Bar President

In Los Angeles, California, The Los Angeles Times reports:

• Crooked lawyers have long besmirched the profession's image, but the scale of their involvement in the loan modification scandals plaguing California homeowners has taken an unprecedented toll, the incoming president of the State Bar of California says. The proliferation of complaints against lawyers who said they could help rescue clients threatened with foreclosure has hurt tens of thousands of people and confronted the bar with a mounting and costly disciplinary burden, said Howard Miller, a partner with the Los Angeles plaintiffs' firm of Girardi & Keese. "There are at least hundreds, and perhaps more, perhaps thousands, of lawyers in California who deliberately reached out to obtain money from people at the most vulnerable point in their lives and, as near as anyone can tell, did nothing to help them," Miller said, vowing to make a priority of punishing such misdeeds during his yearlong tenure.

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• Miller was a key supporter of a new rule of professional conduct requiring attorneys to tell clients if they don't carry malpractice insurance. [...] The estimated tens of thousands who lost nonrefundable deposits to unscrupulous lawyers advertising their loan-modification services could have benefited from the knowledge that those attorneys were, for the most part, uninsured, Miller said.

For more, see New head of State Bar of California assails mortgage modification scammers (Los Angeles attorney Howard Miller lambastes lawyers who claimed to be offering help to homeowners facing foreclosure but did nothing except take their money).