Individual homeowners should not try to represent themselves in foreclosure cases. I say this because individual homeowners are not trained in the specific laws regarding foreclosures and they are not trained in the complexity of these cases.
John Anastasio is a foreclosure defense attorney at the Law Offices Of John Anastasio. In this article, he explains the basic reasons why people should not try to represent themselves against the banks in a foreclosure case.
People don’t realize it oftentimes, but foreclosure law is among the most complex areas of the legal system. When it is done right, that is. I should know because I have worked in virtually every area of law over the years.
Foreclosure defense touches on real property law as well as the laws of mortgages and assignments. There are complex issues concerning home ownership and mortgages that are really only coming into play right now, in terms of the securitization of mortgages and the selling of mortgages that went on during the bubble. What was going on at that time was that the banks and lenders were handing out mortgages and then selling them to third parties who would put them into securitized trusts. Now what we are seeing is that there are a lot of issues and legal ramifications that come out of that practice involving whether the initial lender has the right to sue in a foreclosure case.
Hiring a lawyer who specializes in this area will give you the best chance of a positive outcome in a foreclosure case. Because in some cases, the bank or lender who is suing you might not even have that right. In legal terms, we call that standing—the right to sue.
Of course, this isn’t to say that hiring a lawyer is necessarily the only way you can determine whether the bank who is a filing a lawsuit against you has that right. But for the majority of people—especially those who just don’t have the hundreds of hours of free time it is going to take to try and figure out the specific laws—hiring a lawyer to represent them in a foreclosure case is going to be their best option.
Not only do most people not have the background to be able to understand this complex area of law, but they most likely don’t have the time to figure out how to request the right information in their case and how to enforce that right to request the information, either. Even once they have gotten the information, if that is the case, then most people still don’t know what to do with it or where to go from there.
In terms of a lot of these factual issues, if you’re trying to determine who owns what parts of a mortgage that is a big undertaking. And a lot of the documents involved in these cases run in the hundreds of thousands of pages. So if you don’t have a team behind you who can go through those, you’re already behind.
Defending yourself in a foreclosure case is a lot more complicated than simply defending yourself in an eviction case. It is a lot more complicated than defending yourself in an auto accident case, too. This is a field of law that is often more complicated and confusing than trying to sort out the medical ramifications in a car accident or personal injury case, even. So that’s why I recommend people contact a lawyer with an expertise in foreclosure law.
While it’s not impossible for a person to defend himself or herself in a foreclosure defense case, it’s certainly not something I would recommend to anyone who’s hoping to come out ahead in the end, either.
