LivingLiesTheTruth – this web site presents the truth about issues Neil Garfield and his acolytes raised on Garfiels’s LivingLies blog. Legal issue observers have taken exception to some of Garfield’s law analyses and commentaries. In particular, Garfield’s views seem to support the foreclosure defense business model that reliably causes borrowers to lose their homes or to accept an onerous and burdensome loan modification. Garfield attacks securitization and the lending system. That leads lawyers and pro se litigants to raise such issues in an effort to defend against foreclosure. Those theories of defense typically (nearly always) fail in the long run because of the principle that a borrower who breached a valid note must ultimately forfeit the collateral. In other words, NO viable foreclosure defense exists. History shows that borrowers tend to win compensation or setoffs against their debt when they artfully attack the validity of the loan. That means borrowers must seek and find the injuries they sustained in the lending or servicing process if they want to win anything meaningful.
Garfield says lawyers “get it” if they follow his philosophy of foreclosure defense. We believe they don’t get it, and that their business model leads borrowers astray. That means such lawyers use “cookie-cutter” pleadings (essentially the same pleadings in every foreclosure defense) for one purpose only – to delay the inevitable loss of the house. Or they will delay it and then convince the borrower to purchase a loan modification or short sale service from that lawyer, from which the lawyer makes a handsome commission. In this business model, the lawyer charges hundreds of dollars monthly “for as long as we can keep you in the house,” and then abandons the borrower at the last minute, often failing to show up at the summary judgment hearing.
We believe Garfield and his minions will never acknowledge themselves as liars and philosophic frauds. We believe most mortgage victim clients of those lawyers who “get it” should sue for legal malpractice because the attorney led them into the jaws of foreclosure without ever bothering to examine the loan for torts, contract breaches, legal errors, and regulatory violations that gave the borrower causes of action. We like the idea of exposing their crookedness.
So, we encourage you to offer comments on the articles here, and to name names when complaining about the attorneys who could have helped you get compensated for your injuries, but didn’t. We believe your comments will do more good here than on the LivingLies blog. Readers here will see support for our positions against what we consider as the false doctrines of LivingLies and associated lawyers who don’t get it. We won’t tell you lies, and we will often support our views with salient case law.
We also encourage you to scan any foreclosure complaint and your attorney’s corresponding pleadings, upload them to http://archive.org, and post the link on this site so others can read and compare them. And we encourage you to post your wins in your comments, as well as your losses.
Over time, we will add permanent content via actual web pages, not just blog entries. Please look for the menu at the margins. Also, feel free to follow this blog and share it in your social media pages. We encourage you to create an account, become a subscriber, and tell your friends and associates about this site BEFORE they get in trouble with a mortgage.
You can find other informative articles and commentaries on the Mortgage Attack web site.
By the way, please don’t take my comments as a personal denigration of Neil Garfield. Although I have not met him personally, all of my interactions with him have had a genteel timbre and gracious quality. He seems like a very nice man to me. I just don’t agree with his business model or the underlying philosophy of litigating the wrong issues.
Bob Hurt
727 669 5511
LivingLiesTheTruth 
Anytime you have an attorney blaming judges, you have an attorney you want to run from.
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Good Afternoon Mr. Hurt:
I stumbled upon your blog after reading the latest 6th Circuit decision on a related website and was wondering what your background & experience is in the area of foreclosures, mortgage modification, securitization, etc. The reason I ask is to help me decide whether you are genuinely seeking to aid homeowners (via what you believe are the proper legal avenues) or a disgruntled borrower who was wronged by a lender (and believe me, I wouldn’t blame you if you were.)
In any event, having spent the last decade of my life working on these cases (in one capacity of another), I tend to understand and empathize with your fustration and disdain for the ‘legal-system’ in general, some of the individuals involved therein and many of the arguments used by and/or accepted by the courts. That said, if you’ve been around the block you know, or ought to know, that the ‘winning’ argument can and does varies state to state, circuit to circuit & even, most unbelievably, judge to judge. I have no idea whether Mr. Garland’s arguments have merit or not – the little I know of him is that he believes what he says and makes the best arguments he believes are available.
I suppose what peaked my interest here and evoked a response was your (presumably) general contention that the issue/fault lies with attorneys and how they defend these actions. Let me say, unequivocally: yes, too many attorneys have no God damn clue what they are doing and we really should consider chaining a few hundred-thousand of ’em to the ocean floor. However, for every 10 lazy, inept & utter clueless lawyer, I know 1 that goes out of their way to make any and all valid arguments on behalf of their clients, the homeowner.
My experience, in sum, leads me to the conclusion that the problem isn’t the lawyers (God I can’t believe I’m actually saying this), but rather, with the judges and magistrates in many of these jurisdictions. Yes, the lawyers need to get their act together, do the research, work the case and make the arguments that need to be made; agreed. But what of a judiciary that believes, without doubt or reservation, that it may sit in moral/ethical judgment of homeowners? What of judges and magistrates that issue rulings, time and again, which are wholly violative of American jurisprudence?
Again, none of this alters or mitigated an attorneys personal & professional duty – good, bad or indifferent they have a job and it needs to be done near perfect, every time. But where does the public, and homeowners in particular, begin to bear responsibility for voting into office judges and magistrates that allow blatant, obvious and often ceaseless fraud to be commited upon their courts. I couldn’t tell you how many instances wherein which evidence of clear fraud was pointed out to the court only to be met by the often repeated: “yeah, but the borrower is living in the home and hasn’t paid.” And I’m not taking kinda-sorta, maybe fraud…. I’m taking, oh my good lord…. you gotta be fucking kidding me, fraud!
Anyways Mr. Hurt, you seem to be an intelligent individual & I suppose any citizen taking time & energy out of their day to help another citizen out is something to be commended and congratulated. Should I be of any assistance to you sir, please do not hesitate to shoot me an email…. we are all trying to fight the fight; who knows, maybe one day, someone will get a clue and follow the law.
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Mr. Vallez:
Although some say law school resembles an intensely political high school environment on steroids, I do admire the accomplishment of those who have completed it. And yet, it constitutes a staggering disappointment to those who pass the bar and enter the legal profession because they realize they have become virtual morons, singularly unable to do what clients and senior partners expect of them. We can only blame the primary educational system for that. Children and families suffer such a paucity of knowledge of the roles of judges, courts, lawyers, rules, and litigation practice that no 3-year law school can compensate for it. The legal profession should operate more like the medical profession when it comes to training. But more importantly, children should get the equivalent of the first two years of law school education before graduating from high school. That they don’t get it constitutes a testament to the fear and ignorance of their parents.
Nothing shows this more clearly than the dilemma of people who lose the biggest investment of their lives in foreclosure of the family home. All of them seemed to have hoped the house would, by some magic, grow in value so they could flip it and have enough money to buy a nicer house in a nicer neighborhood, or a place to retire. And when they desperately went looking for a lawyer to help them save the home from foreclosure, they actually expected the lawyer could, by some magic, circumvent the cosmic reality that when they put up the house or car as collateral for a loan, and then stop making timely payments, they simply must forfeit the collateral in order to repay the debt.
I simply say that lawyers who take such breach-of-contract cases owe a duty to examine the loan and surrounding situation for evidence of injury to the client, and that such lawyers become malefactors by failing to do it and to prosecute those injuries in court. Most of them realize the client has money problems or would otherwise make timely house payments, and that they cannot slam the client with the traditional $300-per-hour-plus fee. But those lawyers desperately want to build a practice, so they create a Neal-Garfield-Kool-Aid-Drinker business model calculated to bleed the client monthly for filing pleadings the lawyer plagiarized from other lawyers and adjusted for the client’s case, while bleeding the client for a portion of what they client should have spent on house payments. Pretty slick. They collect $20K to $30K per client that way, for escorting them into foreclosure, a loan mod, or short-sale.
I see that as crooked, as legal malpractice. I want lawyers to turn down a clients flat unless willing to do the work necessary to win compensation for them. Why? Because 90% of those clients have suffered injuries at the hands of the appraiser, mortgage broker, Realtor, title company, lender, servicer, or someone else involved in the lending or servicing process. And because foreclosure defense outside the scope of such injuries will simply delay the inevitable loss of the house. And the client does not need a lawyer to delay the foreclosure.
If people got a proper legal education in high school, they would succeed better as pro se litigants. But now even lawyers like Garfield complain about biased or crooked judges for tossing their frivolous arguments aside, when the judge merely does his job.
I know that I cannot transform the legal industry or foreclosure defense industry, but my words make such good sense to so many borrowers that they call me and ask me how to get a mortgage examined so they will have some chance of beating the bank and keeping their home. I send them to the only competent mortgage examiner I know. I have done this since 2009. I have not charged any of them a penny for the service of helping them understand the strategy of mortgage attack (see http://MortgageAttack.com), and how that methodology, and ONLY that methodology, will help them receive compensation for their injuries and save their family home or investment property. In time, I might actually do some good on this whirling rock.
As for my background, I consider myself a perpetual student of law. I am a former computer technologist (writing, teaching, programming, engineering, managing) who created and marketed computer test products toward the end of my career. I hail from a long line of lawyers, judges, and Baptist preachers (google James Mann Hurt, Jr., one of my grandfather’s grandfather). I once conducted foreclosure defense seminars. Now I study law as I please, write commentaries, develop web sites, and discuss issues with whomever calls me at 727-669-5511. I accept PayPal donations through http://bobhurt.com/lawdonation.htm.
I am not an attorney. I do not give legal advice or practice law.
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