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A Securitization Audit Will Not Save Your Home, and Why You Can't Find a Lawyer To Help

A Securitization Audit Will Not Save Your Home, and Why You Can't Find a Lawyer To Help

Last week I posted here about some of the detours I've taken since starting Desert Edge Legal and since the foreclosure defense work ended around 2013.

Since then, I continue to receive e-mails from homeowners asking for help, and in this video, I discuss a specific type of homeowner and how they all typically make the same request, which is for securitization information.

This particular category of homeowner has typically been in foreclosure for a long time, sometimes as long as a decade. Some of these people have been in foreclosure for as long as a decade at this point and they are still hanging on. This particular type of homeowner always e-mails me to ask for a securitization audit. I've said numerous times before that securitization is not a magic bullet. It is not a good strategy to focus on securitization and ignore all the other information that is more easily accessed. I don't know who continues to propagate this idea unless it's someone who is selling securitization audits to part you with your money.

To be clear: I don't sell securitization audits. I look at other facts and evidence and figure out where the issues are with the foreclosure documents. This is different than securitization research that breaks down the transfers of your loan and digging into the details of the securitization.

I'm not saying that securitization audits aren't useful. They probably are, but only in certain circumstances. I think a lawyer should make that call. I have never seen a lawyer use a securitization audit to defend a foreclosure. I'm not personally interested in selling people something that I know is not going to help them.

The other thing I talk about in this video is why you have trouble finding a lawyer who will help you fight for your home. If you consulted with several lawyers and all of them told you that your ideas about fighting foreclosure were not going to work, were stupid or the lawyer was rude and condescending, you might think it's you.

The reason lawyers are like this is multi-layered and complex. First off, the legal industry is hell bent on ensuring that the legal profession does not allow anyone to work in the industry without being supervised by an attorney. It's not like the medical industry where you have multiple pathways to grow in your career and get another license and get paid well. In the legal career, you're either a lawyer or you're not.

The point I want to make here is that it's NOT YOU. It's not the loan auditor. The problem is that the legal industry is broken and it's inflexible.

The legal industry is failing the public. When a huge swath of the population cannot afford to pay for legal services, that is a huge failure. And, many lawyers refuse to consider that they could be wrong, that non-lawyers have contributions that could help them get better outcomes, or that someone else might know more than they know about a particular area of expertise, such as loan auditors.

I've heard the same crap from lawyers for ten years and from a career standpoint as a paralegal, they don't have much to offer in terms of career growth anymore. The law firm jobs in Phoenix I've seen on Craigslist are paying around $15 an hour, no benefits or paid time off, and they want you to run the whole firm. It seems to me that employers haven't gotten the message that the job market is tightening and they are going to lose their employees to better jobs.

For me personally, working in a law firm as an employee is not appealing to me at this stage of my career. I've done that already. And honestly, I don't want someone else controlling my time or how much I earn.

Try not to take it personal if a lawyer tells you he/she can't use your ideas or the loan audit report. It's a symptom of the overall brokenness of the legal system and until it finally changes, you have to outsmart the system.

The way you do this is PREPARE in advance. If you know you are going into foreclosure, give yourself eight months to a year to prepare. Get an audit, talk to different lawyers (consider hiring a female lawyer), talk to a bankruptcy lawyer, look at the case law in your state, and save some money so you can afford to move forward with your plan.  You will have to pay a lawyer to get the best outcome.