Category Archives: Econ & Money: Mortgage Mess

Apparently, at Goldman, Sachs they're not just feeling the heat, they're packing it too:

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.

(Alice Schroeder at Bloomberg.com)

Yes, the title is ironic.

You know you are having a good day when 'Above the Law' (ATL) writes something positive about you — and that was my experience this afternoon with University of Miami Law School Puts Some Money into Public Service.

In addition to not making me look bad — indeed, making me look nice — I especially liked the conclusion of the piece,

The recession has created a huge need for legal services. And it has created a glut of laid off or unemployed lawyers. But matching the attorneys to the work is difficult because it is tough to pay off law school debts by helping low income families fight off foreclosure proceedings. Miami’s programs aren’t going to fix that fundamental disconnect between the cost of law school and the need for legal services.

But the school has taken a nice step in the right direction. The fellowship stipend might not be much, but it is infinitely more valuable than lip service.

ATL is best known for ribbing or even bashing lawyers and law schools…and the commentators in its threads are ferocious on a good day, and worse otherwise. (Indeed, the first comment on the article reads, in full, “Suck it.”)

The law school also got a good write-up in the ABA Journal's Miami Law Grads Get $10K Foreclosure Fellowships to Fill Legal Services Gap.

Update: Even nicer write up at South Florida Lawyers. Thanks guys.

TIME Magazine has a great story by Tim Padgett on UM's Foreclosure Fellowships, Another Housing Crisis: A Shortage of Foreclosure Lawyers.

Nice quotes from Yolanda Paschal, one of our great Fellows, from Carolina Lombardi, a senior attorney at Legal Services of Greater Miami Inc., and a few words from me. I'm glad that our program is getting some recognition. As the article says, the foreclosure defense problem is enormous, the legal resources available are puny compared to the need, and we at the law school are trying to do something about it.

Whether and how we can repeat this year's effort, however, still depends on what sort of funding we can raise for it. Fund raising is very very tough in the current economic climate. Our current plan is to shift away from giving fellowships to graduates and instead ramp up on a student-staffed housing-related clinic that might even be housed downtown. In a perfect world, I'd like to do both the clinic and the graduate Fellowships, but the funding is not yet in hand to make that possible.

Incidentally, the legal defense for borrowers that I mentioned in the the TIME article — that parties foreclosing sometimes don't actually know who owns the note — is featured in a column in today's NYT, Gretchen Morgenson's If Lenders Say 'The Dog Ate Your Mortgage'. In other cases there are different meritorious defenses, but it takes a trained person to identify them. And then no doubt there are the cases where people really will lose their homes no matter what you do; the point is to figure out which case is which rather than just give up. And that takes a lawyer.

We had a real happening of a foreclosure defense seminar yesterday. Here's how the law school wrote it up, but it was even better than it sounds:

Fighting the Foreclosure Crisis: Foreclosure Defense Specialist April Charney, JD '80, Shares Expert Advice in Workshop

Over 150 lawyers attended a foreclosure workshop, hosted by the University of Miami School of Law on October 2nd, which featured April Charney, JD '80, a consumer lawyer and nationally recognized foreclosure defense expert. Charney addressed such topics as federal and state law that govern mortgage origination, common law/state law causes of action and affirmative defenses, drafting discovery and motion practice, and ethical considerations in foreclosure practice.

Charney’s daylong “Defending Foreclosures” classes have gained widespread popularity with lawyers throughout the country. She has taught in Ohio, California, Minnesota, South Carolina, Missouri and throughout Florida. Charney requires that all attendees perform 20 hours of pro bono legal work in their communities.

“The workshop has been tremendously informative and has made me realize how complicated this area is,” said Yolanda Paschal, JD ’09, one of the Foreclosure Defense Fellows who will be working with the Legal Services of Greater Miami starting on Monday, October 5th. “I anticipate that this fellowship will be challenging and I look forward to that.”

The Foreclosure Defense Fellowship, recently created by the School of Law, will enable newly minted lawyers to give free help to local residents caught in the foreclosure crisis. The School of Law is one of the first schools in the nation to create a program of this kind. Recent UM graduates will acquire real-world experience and address a serious need in the community at the same time.

Excited to be back at her alma mater, Charney took a moment from the workshop to commend the School of Law for establishing the new Foreclosure Defense Fellowship Program and Professor A. Michael Froomkin for his leadership with the project. “The foreclosure crisis in Florida is troubling,” said Charney, “but at least this program will do good work to help homeowners keep their homes.”

“April Charney delivered a tour de force performance on foreclosure defense, backed up by a CD with over 1,000 pages of sample complaints, depositions, and litigation checklists,” said Froomkin. “I wish all my students could attend lectures like this to learn about the law on the ground as it is playing out in the context of a financial crisis.”

It was an event. Great as it was, April Charney wasn't entirely happy: She groused that some of the attendees were from what she calls “the dark side” — foreclosure specialists coming to find out what defense counsel will be doing to them.