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: South Florida Lawyers

$400 an Hour for Foreclosure Defense? (and Glenn Garvin).

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Remember when Glenn Garvin laughably contended that the only people in foreclosure trouble were those who deserved it?

This was his particularly ill-informed contention:

For all their frothing fulmination, neither the lawyers nor politicians nor journalists have been able to come up with any credible stories of people losing their homes despite faithfully paying their mortgages. They couldn't even find stories about people losing their homes despite being just a couple of payments behind.
That's because there aren't any.

So it's not particularly surprising that Glenn Garvin's own newspaper once again proves him dead wrong, in this harrowing tale of a foreclosure nightmare gone from bad to worse.

But I found this part pretty outrageous:

Hall paid her first lawyer, Alan Soven, more than $10,000 to fight the foreclosure. At one point Judge Friedman rebuked the Miami lawyer for subpar legal work, and the Florida Bar ordered him to refund $2,000 in legal fees to Hall in a mediation settlement. With a $400 hourly rate, he charged Hall nearly $3,000 for the 7.2 hours he spent trying to get legal approval to quit the case, court records show.

Soven declined to comment on the case.

Hall's next lawyer, Johnny Kincaide of The Kincaide Law Group in Weston, routinely skipped crucial court hearings and failed to file a response to a court ruling, causing the judge to penalize Hall with an order of default. Kincaide's firm is being investigated by Attorney General Bill McCollum after several homeowners said he promised to help them get a mortgage modification and then disappeared after taking their initial deposits. He did not return calls seeking comment.

I don't know whether the allegations of legal malpractice or incompetence are true, but there's really no good reason to charge $400 an hour to handle the defense of any foreclosure action, let alone to charge the client to withdraw from the case.

Good thing there are "no credible stories" of people getting screwed over in the foreclosure morass for Glenn to write about.

Full post as published by South Florida Lawyers on November 22, 2010 (boomark / email).