Deutsche Bank foreclosures: Trial lawyers finally on the scene
I only know what Channel 3 carried yesterday: Personal injury law firm Novak, Robenalt and Pavlik has filed in an unidentified court (Common Pleas, I assume) on behalf of one or more former local homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosures by Deutsche Bank, seeking recovery and damages on behalf of Deutsche Bank foreclosees as a class.
Their apparent grounds: Deutsche Bank sought and was granted thousands of foreclosures by local Common Pleas judges and magistrates, without establishing in court that it had standing to do so.
Deutsche Bank currently holds title to more than a thousand foreclosed Cuyahoga County homes.
According to the WKYC story, the attorneys are citing (or at least alluding to) the late 2007 decisions by Federal Court judges Chris Boyko and Kathleen O’Malley to toss out a few dozen Deutsche Bank foreclosures on their dockets for lack of evidence that DB — which always acts in these cases as the trustee for investors in securitized mortgage investment pools — actually was, or represented, the holder of the mortgages in question.
(Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, who’s pursuing a related Boyko-based initiative to get several Common Pleas courts`to start rejecting foreclosures whose plaintiffs lack full ownership documentation, lost a round Monday when his argument was rejected by a Hamilton County magistrate. For Dann, of course, this is just a first step to get the issue to a higher court.)
WKYC says Novak Robenalt “is also working with the firm of Cohen, Rosenthal, and Kramer”, which is the City’s outside counsel in its public nuisance litigation against Deutsche Bank and twenty other firms involved in securitizing Cleveland subprime mortgages. It’s unclear whether the Cohen firm is seeking to represent foreclosed individuals directly.
In the video story, Jeff Maynor says Novak Robenalt is looking at Wells Fargo — which is trying to dodge the City’s lawsuit with a claim that it encroaches on Federal regulatory authority — as a second class action target.
Nothing about the Novak Robenalt suit in the Plain Dealer this morning. Hopefully we’ll learn more tomorrow. Stay tuned.
(Thanks to Jeff Small for alerting me to the story.)
February 9th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Yes I was amazed at the idea that they would try to foreclose before actually having title to the properties. Never sure if you can believe news stories but they said that some people may get their homes back because of this.