Tonight! Lawyer or Pro Se? The Neil Garfield Show with Charles Marshall

Is it better to lawyer up or is it better to go it alone?

Thursdays LIVE! Click in to the Neil Garfield Show

Tonight’s Show Hosted by Charles Marshall, Esq. 

Call in at (347) 850-1260, 6pm Eastern Thursdays

We all know the theoretical answer. If you go into an operating room at a hospital you want a doctor doing whatever needs to be done. If you’re on an airplane you want a pilot. There is no guarantee that everything will turn out right but we can all agree that the chances for a favorable outcome are better with the doctor in the operating rom and a pilot at the controls.

So the same holds true for going to court. The lawyer is going to know the courthouse, the people, the rules and the applicable law better than you do. A lot of “bad law” has been created because of poor presentations in court that didn’t attack the central issues.

BUT, homeowners are afraid of getting ripped off again. And lawyers cost money. So lots of people, back in the mid 2000’s were representing themselves and some of them did pretty well. Lawyers, from the start, were back-peddling from foreclosure defense for two reasons: they were afraid of not getting paid enough and they didn’t want to lose a bunch of cases.

The key point here is that complete success is possible and does happen. The statistics are piled against that result because the statistics include uncontested cases where the ghosts get the foreclosure simply because nobody opposed it.

And there is the perpetual problem arising from bias (invalid assumptions): (1) homeowners do owe the money (not necessarily true) (2) once they stop paying homeowners should lose the house no matter who brings the claim. So instead of presenting a passionate and aggressive and successful defense many lawyers argue only half-heartedly present the defense and get steam-rolled by lawyers who may not even  have a client.

After everything is untangled, it is unclear whether there is an actual legal or even equitable liability of a homeowner, whose name is used to sell dozens of derivatives that amount to multiple sales of the initial homeowner liability.  Some might ask why should homeowners get a windfall and the answer is simple: most of them were cheated by predatory loan products that intentionally overvalued homes and intentionally drove prices far higher than standard valuations. They got screwed by ghost lenders who made millions on even low amounts of mortgage debt.

My take is if the real lenders made more than the amount they lended, then there is no debt. If that undermines the rationale behind the sales of bogus MBS and derivatives, that risk should fall on the investment banks who were most probably the only parties that qualify as lenders, even if they were using other people’s money to make the loans.

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