from Andy Krol:
ay back in August 2010, I sounded the alarm about a fellow named David J. Stern, a lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who’d gotten rich off the housing meltdown of the mid-2000s. Stern ran a law firm that handled foreclosure cases as fast as possible for big banks and the quasi-governmental housing corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But as I revealed, Stern’s law firm, paid per case, increasingly cut corners and, in some cases, duped judges in Florida’s overwhelmed court system in the race to foreclose on more people and make more money. (One local judge said a key document filed by a lawyer in Stern’s firm was “fraudulently backdated, in a purposeful, intentional effort to mislead the defendant and this court.”) Stern’s firm, I noted, was among the largest of a thriving breed of law firms profiting off of the housing crisis””and called them “foreclosure mills.”
