Florida Bar At Risk Of 'Drowning' By Complaints Against Attorneys Accused Of/Associated With Loan Modification Ripoffs?

In West Palm Beach, Florida, The Palm Beach Post reports:

• The Florida Bar has fielded nearly 1,400 complaints against attorneys relating to the housing crisis, an unprecedented amount that has buried investigators and forced the group to rethink how it will handle widespread grievances in the future.



• Beginning in the fall of 2010, as foreclosures receded because of robo-signing revelations, a wave of consumer complaints alleging attorney misconduct began to hit the Bar.



• The complaint categories - mortgage fraud, foreclosure fraud, loan modification misconduct - didn't even exist three years ago, said Ken Marvin, director of lawyer regulation for the Florida Bar. His first recorded loan modification complaint was in November 2010. Today, 793 cases have been opened.



• "They just started coming in and the numbers were incredible," Marvin said. "We never even had a loan modification category or mortgage fraud or foreclosure fraud, and we had to create all of this because we wanted to track these reliably."

For more, see 'Tsunami' of foreclosure complaints swamps Fla. Bar.

See ETHICS ALERT: Lawyers should be very wary of loan modifiers: for a Florida Bar Ethics Alert to its members providing guidance on the "do's & don'ts" when dealing with potentially fraudulent loan modifications rackets.