GMAC Hired White-Shoe Firm To Target Maine Attorney For Release Of "Stephan" Deposition???

Mother Jones reports:

• Is GMAC Mortgage, the company under siege by numerous state attorneys general and members of Congress for its use of dubious foreclosure legal filings, trying to silence the lawyer who exposed the bank's practices? So says Thomas Cox, the Maine attorney whose case is at the center of GMAC's ongoing debacle.

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• [Cox] posted the [Jeffery Stephan] deposition, he says, to an email listserv for the National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA), of which he's a member. The ramifications of Stephan's admission, he knew, exposed major flaws in GMAC's foreclosure filings and cast doubt on the validity of tens of thousands of cases throught the country.

• Cox had solicited help from other NACA attorneys before. Now he was returning the favor. Before long, the deposition went public on a foreclosure defense blog written by a St. Petersburg, Florida-based attorney who dubbed Stephan the "New Robo Signer." (In October, the Stephan deposition formed the basis of a major class action against GMAC filed by five Maine homeowners and represented by Cox, the National Consumer Law Center, and the Center for Responsible Lending.)

• Then, in mid-June, Cox says, something odd happened. GMAC fired the local attorney who'd handled the case up to that point and replaced her with counsel from a powerful white-shoe firm, Pierce Atwood. The new firm's first move was to accuse Cox of violating Maine civil court rules by distributing legal documents that caused "embarrassment, annoyance, oppression, and intimidation" of GMAC and Stephan. (GMAC's attorneys say Cox sent the deposition directly to the Florida blog, which he denies.)

• The firm demanded financial sanctions against Cox totaling thousands of dollars. And it asked the court to make Cox retrieve the deposition from blogs and website, effectively yanking it off the Internet, and prevent him from further sharing the deposition or using it in any other GMAC-related cases. Cox fired back by saying he had every right to share the deposition. Blocking his use of the document violated his First Amendment rights, he argued.

For more, see Did GMAC Try to Bury Its Foreclosure Smoking Gun? (The deposition the lender really, really doesn't want you to see).