One of the most disturbing things about the whole episode that is Fraudclosuregate is the involvement of lawyers at every step of the process. The continually-evolving tragedy has emphasized the very worst aspects of my profession and shown the inability or unwillingness for anyone to call the conduct what it is…and in some cases it’s criminal. If we are to get back any respect for the profession and for our system of laws, the public is going to demand that parties be held accountable….but don’t just listen to me….
On Friday, the SEC announced it is taking administrative action against David M. Tamman, a partner at Greenberg Traurig, a major international law firm. (Or at least, he was a partner: His page on the firm’s website has been removed.) The SEC is going after Tamman because it says he falsified a document that described securities he helped a client sell. That is, when the SEC asked Tamman for copies, it says he altered the real document and gave the SEC the fake.
While that conduct is egregious — and kudos to the SEC for going after him — it’s not that different than the ways many, many lawyers have behaved throughout this documentation debacle. For example, attorneys for multiple banks have been giving courts fraudulent documents in order to speed foreclosures, in many cases “robo-signing” the documents themselves. And consider the magnitude of the carelessness — it seems at least like malpractice to me — employed by the big firms involved in the securitization deals.
