Calif. State Bar Prez Blasts Lawyers for Taking Advantage of Foreclosure Clients
The new president of the State Bar of California has a message for unscrupulous lawyers who took money from vulnerable clients facing foreclosure without doing anything to help: Your misdeeds will be a priority of disciplinary officials.
New state bar president Howard Miller, a partner with the Los Angeles plaintiffs law firm Girardi & Keese, told the Los Angeles Times that an unprecedented number of lawyers are involved in mortgage modification scandals.
“There are at least hundreds, and perhaps more, perhaps thousands, of lawyers in California who deliberately reached out to obtain money from people at the most vulnerable point in their lives and, as near as anyone can tell, did nothing to help them,” Miller told the newspaper.
Miller supported a new ethics rule adopted earlier this month that requires lawyers to inform clients if they don’t have malpractice insurance. He told the Times that most of the lawyers who collected nonrefundable deposits for loan-modification services did not have insurance, and clients could have benefited from that knowledge.
The bar is working with the state Department of Real Estate and California Attorney General Jerry Brown to require mortgage foreclosure consultants to register with Brown’s office and post $100,000 bond, according to the story.
