Friday, October 29, 2010

Fumigating For Roaches

One of the lawyers leading the foreclosure fight is is from my old neck of the woods in Western NC:  O. Max Gardner III.  Max has been running boot camps for lawyers to beat foreclosures because the banks don't have the proper paperwork, and he's been running them for years.

Now his graduates are about to rip the banks to pieces.  Show me the note!

"He's Atticus Finch," said April Charney, an attorney with Jacksonville Legal Aid in Florida, referring to the lawyer in the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" who is seen as a model for lawyers protecting the disadvantaged.
Charney attended one of Gardner's boot camps in 2007, and she has known him since 2004.

Gardner has been thrust in the limelight recently thanks to what his techniques have uncovered: banks have been taking shortcuts in their efforts to foreclose on homes quickly.

Banks and their lawyers have been cranking out paperwork faster than anyone could properly review it, and they are often making mistakes.

"He's been on top of this from the beginning. He's on the bleeding edge," said David Treywick, a Mount Pleasant, South Carolina-bankruptcy attorney who views Gardner as a leader in the field.

Lawyers representing borrowers have started demanding that banks show all their paperwork to move forward with foreclosures.

To Gardner's critics, that's exactly what's wrong with the North Carolina lawyer: he is keeping insolvent borrowers in their homes for longer than they ought to be living there.

Counsel opposing Gardner often view him as an agitator who gums up the bankruptcy process, said Joseph Greer III, a corporate bankruptcy lawyer in North Carolina who often works with creditors.

"Max has never been afraid to go his own way, and isn't one that needs to fit into a crowd," Greer said.

But he wins.  And he wins because "Show me the note!" works.  Now his version of Dumbledore's Army is taking on the megabanks all over the country.  And Max and his students are about to roll some big, big people.

Have you asked YOUR mortgage holder to "Show me the note!" yet?

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