Contingent Fee Plaintiffs Attorneys A Key In Representing Financially Strapped Homeowners Against Sloppy Mortgage Lenders

A December, 2007 article by attorney Michele Magar in California Progress Report reminds us of the importance of contingent fee private attorneys coming forward to represent homeowners facing the possible loss of their homes against lenders with faulty loan documents. A couple of excerpts:

• The [state] legislature is doing little to stop this disaster, but plaintiffs' attorneys can help. Federal and state laws which offer statutory attorneys’ fees enable attorneys to help desperate homeowners restructure abusive loans into sustainable ones, rescind predatory mortgages altogether, and battle foreclosure rescue scams.

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• “Sorting out winnable cases is not hard to do, but lawyers have to work on contingency or rely on statutory attorneys fees because typically clients have no money to pay up front to hire lawyers,” said Shirley Hochhausen. Hochhausen teaches a predatory lending clinic at the University of San Francisco School of Law and is co-counseling 36 cases with private practitioners via the Fair Lending Consortium, a Bay area group she organized to develop predatory lending expertise among private attorneys. Hochhausen works [...] at the Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, and refers overflow clients to private attorneys in Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin and Alameda Counties.

According to one San Francisco attorney quoted in the article who specializes in helping homeowners fight abusive loans, “Ninety percent of loan documents I see have blank three-day rescission notices or contain other [Truth In Lending Act] violations.”

For more, see Right Now, Consumer Attorneys May Be the Best Hope for Californians Stuck in Predatory Loans.