Fla F'closure Mills Now Use 'Robo-Verifiers' As 'End Run' Around New State High Court Rules As Some Trial Judges Continue To Yawn & Snooze

The Daily Business Review reports:

• Lenders and their law firms are violating new procedures implemented by the Florida Supreme Court intended to address a controversy over botched foreclosure cases, according to attorneys for homeowners.

• After a national foreclosure scandal that resulted in a moratorium, new procedures implemented by lenders and their law firms are still falling short of requirements set by the state's high court, the defense lawyers say.

• The attorneys for homeowners claim that so-called robo-signers, who signed off on foreclosure paperwork en masse, have been replaced by "robo-verifiers" in the wake of the new Supreme Court rules. They contend that lenders are still failing to ensure that the foreclosure cases they pursue are accurate and that they own the loan in question.

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• In a deposition conducted in early December by an attorney with the Ice Legal firm, a Wells Fargo employee detailed the bank's "verification" process. The employee, Alden Berner, said he and two other "legal process specialists" were in charge of verifying all of Wells Fargo's foreclosure cases filed in Florida. Berner declined to estimate how many cases he verified on a daily basis. "He got the message not to come out sounding like a robo-signer," said foreclosure defense attorney Thomas Ice.

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• Berner's role as a verifier differs from that of a robo-signer. Critics say robo-signers sign foreclosure documents without having knowledge of their contents. In Berner's case, he testified that he uses a computer only to verify the name of the lender or loan servicer against the name of the investment entity that owns the loan. That still falls short of the intent of the Supreme Court ruling, critics say.

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• Ice said he has encountered several cases in which foreclosure attorneys signed as verifiers of documents to "pretend" they were complying with the rule. "The purpose of this is for the lenders and servicers to check what the attorneys are doing," Ice said. "So in the end they will be responsible for mistakes and won't be able to say, 'I thought my attorney did it right.' " An attorney's signature on a complaint is already considered a verification, according to Florida Bar rules. "This was intended as an extra layer of precaution," he said.

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• While some judges have accepted complaints verified by attorneys, at least one judge in Pinellas County recently criticized the practice and dismissed a case because of what he considered to be an unverified foreclosure complaint. "The Supreme Court clearly indicates in its opinion that one of the primary purposes of the rule change is to have the plaintiff appropriately investigate and verify its allegations," according to 6th Circuit Court Judge Anthony Rondolino's ruling. "An attorney should not become a witness substituting for these essential client verifications."

For the story, see Defense lawyers raise new issue: 'Robo-verifiers'.