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Presently, I'm a business and real estate trial attorney. Previously,
I spent most of my working career in banking, and I'll give you somewhat of an
explanation with a little detail, just to let you all know where I'm coming from.
I conducted loan acquisitions work for Ocwen Financial. In the 1990s,
Ocwen was probably the largest buyer of bad loans in the world.
We bought billions of dollars of bad loans from other banks each year.
I worked there one year. I managed the attorneys that conducted foreclosures on
behalf of Ocwen. So I did that my first year there, and then I spent four years as a
loan acquisitions analyst, senior analyst and then manager. So I was responsible for
everything from reviewing loan files to figuring out we should pay XYZ $100 million
for ABC portfolio. Shortly after leaving Ocwen, I started my own consulting company,
and I've done work through that, both before law school, during law school,
and after law school, for a total of maybe 2.5 years. I've worked for Lehman
Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Countrywide, many of the big lenders,
either directly through my consulting company or through other consulting companies.
Essentially, what they would hire us to do and I'll give you a hypothetical.
Let's say Countrywide would be purchasing a billion dollars worth of residential
loans from XYZ mortgage originator, and they would hire me and probably 20 other
people like me, and we would show up at their offices in California or wherever the
loan files happen to be located. We'd do a random sample of,
let's say, 5,000 loan files. We'd look at 20 or 30 or 40 a day and figure out if the
loans actually matched up with the underwriting guidelines or the criteria that the
seller/lender says that they underwrote those loans to, the lending standards.
Quite often, we would report back to Countrywide, for example,
and say, "Look guys, 20% of the loans we reviewed fell outside of the seller bank's
own standards. So they weren't even following their own guidelines."
Then Countrywide would tweak their bid, maybe reduce it by $50 million,
or it might make adjustments to the contract and provide for repurchase provisions.
So that's kind of my background prior to and a little after law school.
Presently, I do business and real estate litigation, and also foreclosure defense,
and also advise people concerning short sales, loan mods, foreclosures,
deeds, and things of that nature. My average client is probably someone who is
upside down $150,000. Half of them have suffered a financial hardship.
The other half have probably just said, "Screw it. I'm $150,000
upside down, $300,000 upside down." I aggressively litigate.
In a large part, I utilize my banking background to aggressively litigate and try to
get my clients off the hook from a deficiency judgment. So that's most of my clients
presently.