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Paschal plans to practice business litigation next fall once she joins the firm that hired her. In the meantime, she will put her legal education to use for South Floridians like her family thanks to a $10,000 foreclosure-defense fellowship she received from the UM law school. The innovative new grant program has sent out eight recent grads this month to help local residents navigate one of the law's most labyrinthine arenas. (See pictures of Cleveland's struggle with the housing crisis...
...much as Paschal and her UM colleagues can help a little, they represent only a drop in the bucket: with foreclosures continuing to rise, the shortage of lawyers available to represent homeowners trying to save their most precious asset has reached emergency proportions. (See a video of Joel Stein exploring the foreclosures of Las Vegas...
That specter of judicial paralysis helped spur UM law professor Michael Froomkin to create the foreclosure-defense program. It places fledgling attorneys like Paschal with legal-aid-service organizations to help tackle the backlog of cases - more than 50,000 foreclosure filings so far this year in Miami-Dade County alone. Many homeowners don't know what legal defenses are available to them as they battle lenders to keep their properties - or at least make foreclosure less painful and less costly. "Potentially, one of the most significant [defenses] is that the lender, because so many home loans were securitized during...
Carolina Lombardi, a senior attorney at Legal Services of Greater Miami Inc., which is mentoring some of the UM fellows, says foreclosure defendants also need attorneys to help them fend off all-too-frequent lender practices like exorbitant escrow claims. "Homeowners who have lawyers are usually prevailing in those cases," says Lombardi. But she notes that unless homeowners fall below the federal poverty line ($22,000 for a family of four), they can't qualify for the free legal aid that agencies like hers provide. That creates an obstacle for most foreclosure defendants, who aren't impoverished but because...
Still, law schools like Miami's may be one of the best untapped sources. Other programs, like Yale Law School's ROOF Project, also send students into local communities to aid foreclosure cases, but UM's is one of the first to create a paid fellowship. It also makes sense, says Paschal, since so many law firms today are trimming costs by delaying the start date for new hires by a year or more. That gives law grads time to pursue this kind of work - whose complexity, Paschal adds, is ideal for cutting young legal teeth. Says Froomkin...