With degrees from New York University and Seton Hall University School of Law, attorney John Anastasio has become a renowned expert in the field of foreclosure law. At his law Florida firm, the Law Offices Of John Anastasio, he works on behalf of homeowners. Here, he shares his knowledge about the right questions to ask a foreclosure attorney during the initial consultation.
The first thing you want to ask a lawyer when you’re going in for an initial consultation is what does he have planned for you? Is he looking to see what your goals are, or does he have his own agenda? The kind of lawyer you want is someone who has your interests above his or her own.
A competent foreclosure attorney is going to be looking to see how his or her plan is fitting in with your own personal financial goals, your financial future, and your family’s future. If he is looking in that direction in designing a litigation defense in that way, then you might have the right guy—and that’s still assuming he knows what he’s doing.
On the flip side, if you are talking to an attorney and he is simply bringing up ideas on how to delay the process and talking about seeing what he can “work out” with the lender—well, I can “work out” every case through a loan modification. That’s easy. But that’s not what I do as a lawyer, because I don’t want to throw my clients under the bus.
The thing that you need to realize is that 85% of these loan modifications fail. I don’t want my clients to fail. Most foreclosure defense lawyers are kind of like family law lawyers in that they just want to get the case over as quickly as possible and get it out the door. But you can’t do that, and you shouldn’t hire an attorney who operates that way. If a lawyer isn’t looking forward and checking out whether his or her client can really afford this plan he’s working on, then that’s a problem.
Beyond that, though, I’m looking at the bigger picture when someone comes into my office facing foreclosure. For me, it isn’t just a matter of asking whether a client keeps his house. I’m looking at asking whether this client should keep the house.
Some people might ask why there would be a question debating whether a homeowner should keep a house. Well, as a practical matter—this current economy we’re living in has brought about some tough questions. Namely, the fact that for many people they are never going to be able to get the money they put into their homes back. And if the house is never going to be worth as much as you owe on it, then you have to decide whether or not you want to keep the house at all. Otherwise, to get out of the house, you’ll have to spend $50,000, $100,000, or $200,000 to move somewhere else—or file for bankruptcy. In any event, delaying making a decision could prevent you from getting another house and moving somewhere else in the future.
So the critical questions that foreclosure lawyers want to be asking their clients is what they want to do with their own house. Now sometimes, the clients may want to stay in there a while, just because of the kids. Maybe they don’t want to take their kids out of school in the middle of the year. Or they may have an unusual circumstance where they are not terribly upside down right now and maybe they can see a light at the end of the tunnel. But for most people, it makes no sense to keep their house if it looks like they will ultimately end up being attached to it like a serf was attached to the land in the middle ages—unable to get out from under it.
Some homeowners might think they found a great lawyer because he kept their family in its home. But that could be shortsighted if people aren’t thinking about the long term. It’s going to be a lot easier to get out of these messes right now than it might end up being in the future when the regulations are tighter again. And in that case, your only choice might be bankruptcy.
Foreclosure law is so complex that it is really important that homeowners find a lawyer who has a fire in his belly and it really interested in this stuff. Otherwise, they could end up dealing with a lawyer that really doesn’t know what he’s doing.
