Bilzin Sumberg Launches Mortgage Crisis Blog

Miami, Fla., March 5, 2012 – The law firm of Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price & Axelrod LLP has launched "Mortgage Crisis Watch," a unique blog focused primarily on the continuing legal fallout from the subprime and Alt-A mortgage loan crisis. The blog will highlight and explore the roles played by the government, Wall Street, the big bank aggregators, mortgage loan originators, mortgage loan insurers, and others in this debacle, and the trends and effects of the broader wave of borrower defaults throughout the country.

A particular focus will be the enormous pressure being placed by the larger banks, institutional investors, and government sponsored enterprises on loan originators, correspondents and brokers to "buy back" commercial and residential loans. For the parties facing such pressure, this blog, from a legal team that is wholly on their side, provides a much-needed forum to glean information and seek a way out of the crisis.
 
Bilzin Sumberg's loan repurchase defense team is headed by partners Robert Siegel and Philip Stein, who will serve as editors and primary authors for Mortgage Crisis Watch. "Our goal is to address the business and legal dynamics stemming from the torrent of loan repurchase and make-whole demands," said Siegel, who heads Bilzin Sumberg's Commercial Finance Practice and is a Partner in its Corporate & Securities Group and Restructuring & Bankruptcy Group. "Mortgage origination companies have at their disposal formidable claims and defenses that they often don't realize at first that they have," noted Stein, a Partner in Bilzin Sumberg's Litigation Group.  Loan originators "are largely being misled by larger players in the market as to what is really happening in the repurchase arena, and they deserve to be empowered to resist and overcome the onslaught of loan repurchase and make-whole demands – and we will have a lot to say to that end," added Siegel.
 
"As early as 2006 we recognized two fundamental truths," Stein said. "One, that the big banks were trying to revise history at the expense of our originator clients; and two, that the wave of demands of this sort was only going to increase exponentially over the next several years."
 
Bilzin Sumberg's Litigation Group, cross-leveraging with its Corporate and Tax and Real Estate Groups, has defended billions of dollars of loan repurchase claims throughout the U.S.
 
About Bilzin Sumberg
Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price & Axelrod LLP is a commercial law firm with extensive experience in the areas of commercial finance, corporate and securities, environmental law, land use and government relations, litigation, real estate, restructuring and bankruptcy, tax and wealth preservation planning. For more information, please visit www.bilzin.com.