23-Year Old Med School Dropout Seeks $1.7B From Lender In F'closure Defense Suit; Bank Try To Move Case To Federal Court Gets Boot Back To State Forum

In Pomona, California, the Los Angeles Times reports:

• As foreclosure fights rage in the nation's courts, the battle over Shahida and Ather Ali's house in Diamond Bar looks like a classic mismatch. In one corner, weighing in at $2.5 trillion in assets, sits Deutsche Bank, which is attempting to evict the Alis from their home of 24 years.

• In the other is Zeenat Ali, the couple's diminutive 23-year-old daughter, who dropped out of medical school and sued Deutsche Bank after it foreclosed on the property. Hoping to reclaim title for her parents, Ali has spent half a year litigating in state and federal courts without the help of a lawyer. And though she has no formal legal training, the soft-voiced, 120-pound bantam is more than holding her own.

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• The banks have learned not to underestimate her. In a challenge to her budding legal skills, they sought in May to move her lawsuit to federal court in Los Angeles, where they thought they'd have an easier go of it. Ali responded with 170 pages of legal filings. After reviewing them, U.S. District Judge Gary Feess sided with Ali and last month sent the case back to Pomona Superior.(1)

For more, see Fighting parents' foreclosure, Diamond Bar student wins rounds against Deutsche Bank (With no legal training, Zeenat Ali, 23, has been doing battle in court, winning judgments against the bank and two other companies mainly on procedural grounds).

For a story update, see Eviction stayed 45 more days in Diamond Bar woman's foreclosure fight.

(1) For a Willamette Law Review article that addresses, among other things, the apparent abuse by some corporate defendants in civil cases of removing state court cases to Federal court (which imposes a cost in time and money on plaintiffs and the court system) in an attempt to shop for a friendlier litigation forum, see Erroneous Removal As A Tool For Silent Tort Reform: An Empirical Analysis Of Fee Awards And Fraudulent Joinder (article also available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1073402).