Financial Services Litigation

Womble Carlyle's Financial Services Litigation Team provides its clients with the best of both worlds, bringing together nationally prominent regulatory and compliance experience with the litigation know-how for which Womble Carlyle is known.
 
Womble Carlyle is a leader in the field of consumer financial services litigation both within its "footprint" states in the Southeast and elsewhere. The Team brings together attorneys from Womble Carlyle’s Southeastern-based offices and from a variety of practice groups, supplying both the substantive knowledge required to resolve disputes arising in this complex regulatory framework and the regional familiarity needed to avoid local litigation pitfalls.
 
The Consumer Financial Services Litigation Team boasts a breadth of skills and experience that few can equal. We tackle consumer financial services legal challenges aggressively, whether the need is pre-litigation compliance counseling, systematic or product-specific risk assessment, sensitive state and federal enforcement matters, representation in a judge or jury trial, or assistance evaluating or lobbying for state or federal legislation.
 

Experience

Members of our Financial Services Litigation Team handle all forms of dispute resolution, including pre-litigation negotiations, enforcement matters, mediation, arbitration and full-blown litigation. Clients also enjoy the benefits of Womble Carlyle’s renowned class action practice, and the Team has substantial experience litigating fair lending and discrimination, mortgage lending, banking, insurance and other consumer financial services class action cases.
 
The Team consists of over 20 lawyers, many with extensive trial experience, and includes some of the nation’s leading authorities in consumer financial services regulation and compliance. Our ability to bring this skill set to bear, both at the outset of cases or enforcement actions and during the proceedings, adds a dimension to our services that few firms possess. Our compliance, regulatory and administrative capacities include complex risk assessment and product evaluation under the host of state and federal laws that cover this complex field. So, when we are asked to handle a case or proceeding, we are likely to be familiar with the regulatory, operational and business considerations tied to the dispute or action.
 
Our regulatory, compliance, litigation and dispute resolution experience includes:
  • Truth in Lending Act and Regulation Z
  • Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act and state and local "predatory lending" laws
  • Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and state settlement laws
  • Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and state law equivalents
  • Fair Credit Reporting Act as amended by FACTA
  • Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Regulation B
  • Fair Housing Act and similar state and local laws
  • Consumer Leasing Act and Regulation M
  • Home Owners Loan Act and National Bank Act doctrines of federal preemption and banking powers
  • E-Sign and UETA, as well as payment systems and remittance laws
  • Racketeering and Corrupt Organizations Act ("RICO")
Our attorneys also have significant experience litigating and defending claims brought under state home loan protection acts, unfair and deceptive trade practices acts, and other significant state and federal laws (such as the UCC and federal preemption laws) that impact consumer financial services. Our clients are companies and institutions that offer nearly every type of consumer financial product or service and include banks, mortgage lenders, thrifts, finance companies, automobile lending and leasing companies, technology vendors, insurance companies, investment banks, and non-traditional lenders involved in payday advance lending, refund anticipation loans and on-line lending products.
 
Team attorneys work with each client and, with our regulatory and compliance attorneys, typically engage in careful case assessment at the outset of a matter. This assessment may include nuanced analyses of federal preemption, the interplay of state and federal laws, the regulatory and enforcement climate as to a particular product or practice and the way different (and sometimes conflicting) regulations affect the case. A thorough assessment enables our clients to develop litigation plans and budgets that reflect risk severities and probabilities from the outset of each case. We aim, consistent with our clients’ objectives, to litigate cases and handle disputes efficiently and cost-effectively, while providing clients with early evaluations of cases so that alternate forms of dispute resolution may be evaluated.

Foreclosure Practices Investigations and Litigation

Governmental Investigations 
 
State Attorneys General and other state agencies are more active than ever in investigating and taking action against financial services industry participants. Fifty State Attorneys General, coordinating with state banking regulators, now are investigating allegations of nationwide residential foreclosure improprieties.
 
These investigations involve responses to requests for information and subpoenas, significant data analysis and document production and related scrutiny from plaintiffs’ lawyers. Banks, mortgage servicers and other market participants, including vendors and service providers, will need advice not only on substantive legal issues, but on effective strategies for handling government investigations and pending or potential litigation. Given the scope of the issues, respondents will need document review and case management services to meet delivery deadlines, control costs and maximize efficiency.
 
Womble Carlyle seamlessly combines substantive experience in each of these areas and offers the know-how and relationships to effectively deliver results. Directed by consumer financial services thought leaders and lawyers with must-have relationships, our team will:
 
  • Evaluate exposure on multiple fronts
  • Scope out and direct both systemic and file-level diligence and evaluations
  • Identify and review problem files and documents
  • Interface with law enforcement officials and state and federal regulators
  • Define and help initiate strategies to measure, control and monitor legal, financial and reputational exposure, enabling clients to mitigate enterprise-level risks that accompany in-depth investigations.  
 
Our investigative response team includes former Assistant State Attorneys General and criminal prosecutors and highly-qualified consumer financial services lawyers. In this work, we call upon other meaningful Womble Carlyle resources such as a retired federal judge, a former Chief Justice of a State Supreme Court and a former Governor. Womble Carlyle’s edge is built upon our years of experience in significant government investigations in the pharmaceutical, tobacco, energy and financial services industries. We have been down this path with clients before and we are able to identify and help deploy strategies here and now.
 
Recent Representative Matters

Any result the lawyer or law firm may have achieved on behalf of clients in other matters does not necessarily indicate similar results can be obtained for other clients.
 
  • Currently assisting a number of publicly traded financial services companies in government investigations of lending and loan servicing practices
  • Representing a Fortune 500 company in a multi-state Attorneys General investigation of employment practices
  • Representing a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company in significant federal regulatory investigation.
 

Document Review

Womble Carlyle’s Document Review Solutions Team is a group of trained project attorneys and paralegals dedicated to providing electronic and paper document review services. The operations are located in Winston-Salem and Raleigh, N.C., and overseen by Womble Carlyle lawyers.
 
Benefits the Document Review Solutions Team offers include:
 
  • Experience – Womble Carlyle has more than 20 years of experience providing document review services to various industries, including financial, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, health care and technology
  • Flexibility – Our team is able to handle all sizes of projects for all sorts of matters from SEC and FTC investigations to personal injury claims
  • Consistency – Our team of dedicated professionals brings consistency to document review, privilege review and collection procedures and policies
  • Alternative Fee Arrangements – Projects are frequently priced on alternative fee bases or on a per-document basis
  • High-Quality Work Product – Work product is systematically assessed to ensure accuracy as requested or required
  • Cost-Effective – Our dedicated team of project attorneys and paralegals provides efficient service in a central location
  • Responsive – Because our team is composed of professional document reviewers, we are able to quickly respond and provide immediate service for the inevitable ‘fire drill’
  • Focus – The services our team provides allow clients and their outside counsel to focus on the legal merits rather than costs and logistics of the document review process
  • Teamwork – Our team has a proven track record of successful collaboration with outside counsel.
 
Recent Representative Projects

Any result the lawyer or law firm may have achieved on behalf of clients in other matters does not necessarily indicate similar results can be obtained for other clients.

  • Currently providing large financial services company with all of its document review services including e-discovery advice and counsel. Our document review servicers encompass all of the client’s litigation as well as investigations needs including complete privilege review and logging.
  • Recently completed a large FTC second request review in less than three months. The BullDox team hosted all of the documents within its Relativity platform and applied advanced analytics tools including computer assisted review (predictive coding), reviewed documents for responsiveness and privilege and made all productions to the FTC without a single production issue.
  • In connection with a multi-billion dollar federal criminal investigation of sales and marketing practices, The BullDox team provided a full-range of e-discovery and document review services, including extensive document collection management services, analysis and production of significant structured data, first-line review of millions of electronic documents, and extensive privilege review and logging.
  • Womble Carlyle analyzed real estate closing files and related data for a large mortgage originator defending a class action. As a result of the representation, the Firm successfully defeated the class action in federal court. A review team of attorneys and paraprofessionals completed the review, which involved complicated file-level analysis and a high level of quality control oversight.
  • Womble Carlyle reviewed more than one million emails in less than six weeks in response to an FTC subpoena. More than 50 reviewers were allocated to the project, which was completed on time.
 

Case Management

 
Womble Carlyle provides legal services through our Case Management Facility. Our team has extensive experience in managing crisis-level class action litigation, often involving parallel state and federal proceedings. The CMF practice is structured to not only help clients reduce legal spend, but also allow them to realize the optimum return on the monies they must spend. The CMF helps in-house counsel move legal work to the most appropriate level, deploy technology to capture the value of work product and avoid duplication of effort among outside counsel and reduce the time devoted to managing information and coordinating legal team efforts. Our clients are among the Fortune 100, and we have worked alongside more than half of the AmLaw 100. This practice is not a traditional law firm practice but is critical to our clients’ success.
 
Assess
  • Standardize early case assessment process, and categorize cases and claims for risk assessment
  • Measure exposure by alleged harm – for example, government investigations, fraud and other economic losses, shareholder derivative actions
  • Predict costs by various measures, including region, counsel, discovery deadlines, and statutes of limitation
 
Augment
  • Monitor class allegations and certification status
  • Maximize efficiencies afforded by coordinated proceedings, e.g., direct service of process to CMF, guarantee the coordinating court is timely notified of tag-along matters in multidistrict litigation
  • Control access to materials as appropriate
  • Assure company witness preparation and testimony is focused and controlled
 
Centralize
  • Tell you what business-critical litigation information to track and when
  • Provide online access to information, materials, and work product you and your lawyers need
  • Run standard and customized reports
  • Answer questions about the number of cases, the type, the status, the jurisdiction
  • House all exhibit-related information and provide prior use history so that exhibit use is consistent
  • Extract key issue testimony across transcripts and witness type
  • Ensure consistent answers/responses to pleadings/discovery and generate templates for routine filings
 

Class Actions/Civil Lawsuits Defense

 
Womble Carlyle defends class actions, both independently commenced as well as those filed in conjunction with or following federal and state investigations involving mortgages, commissions and fees, other real estate issues, insurance, antitrust, securities, tax and other substantive areas.  
 
Coordinated document review and data retrieval and analysis goes hand-in-hand with the cost-effective and successful defense of governmental investigations as well as the defense of civil actions, especially class lawsuits. Rapid and accurate manipulation of data and documents is critical in defending against class certification as well as defending on the merits.
 
Representative Cases

Any result the lawyer or law firm may have achieved on behalf of clients in other matters does not necessarily indicate similar results can be obtained for other clients.
 
  • Class certification denied in case alleging bait-and-switch tactics by mortgage broker. (United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.)
  • Class certification denied in real estate-based lawsuit. (State Superior Court, before specially appointed judge.)
  • Summary judgment granted against named plaintiff in putative class involving allegations of auto insurance disclosure violations. (State Superior Court, before specially appointed judge.)
  • Class certification denial, affirmed in a two - one decision on appeal for life insurance company in an alleged discrimination case involving the sale of life insurance policies to minorities. (United States District Court for the District of South Carolina and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.)
  • Favorable settlement in defense of major financial institutions in litigation against paperless mortgage processing, loan pool bundling and resale services company. The plaintiff had claimed more than $20 million in damages.

Regulatory Compliance and Consumer Credit

The Firm’s Regulatory Compliance and Consumer Credit Team consists of a dozen lawyers across the Firm’s footprint. The Team forms one of the largest fully-dedicated practices of its kind in the Southeast United States.
 
Experience Matters
 
Current turmoil in credit markets is creating unprecedented legal challenges. At this time, it is more important than ever for industry participants to choose outside counsel carefully, while dealing with emerging enterprise-level risk and other business challenges. At Womble Carlyle, our attorneys have been there all along. Financial services regulation always has been important to us, not just because of recent developments. We have offered top-notch representation to our retail financial services clients on cutting-edge issues for many years. Our Team provides in-depth counseling and advice based on our long experience in consumer financial services, from our “front-row seat” in the current market turmoil.
 
Industry Knowledge
 
Clients who call on us now, whether banks, non-bank creditors, insurance companies, investment vehicles, vendors or service providers, do so not just because of the Firm’s legal acumen, but for our extensive experience in problem solving and vigorous advocacy for retail financial services market participants. Over the years, Womble Carlyle has handled a full complement of consumer financial services matters, including multi-state compliance projects, class action lawsuits, government enforcement actions, entity formations, financial transactions and retail product development.
 
Focus
 
The Team represents banks, finance companies, nontraditional credit providers, technology vendors, financial investors, insurance companies and other financial service providers in consumer financial services and banking regulatory matters. Our experience includes compliance, regulatory, litigation, legislative, corporate and contract-related engagements involving TILA, RESPA, FDCPA, FCRA/FACTA, ECOA, HMDA and fair lending, GLBA, HERA, EESA, government lending programs (including VA, FHA and USDA) and state consumer credit laws. We have significant experience in government enforcement actions, serving as counsel to industry respondents in actions brought by state and federal regulators. We regularly counsel clients on matters of federal preemption and challenges of financial services providers posed by the interplay of federal and state laws. We represent a number of national technology vendors and service providers to the financial services industry.
 
Scope of Experience

The Team regularly advises creditors, loan servicers, collection agencies and secondary market participants on multi-state licensing regulations and substantive consumer credit laws and regulations in the various states. The Team, working with the Firm’s Economic Stability and Solutions Team, currently is advising financial institutions and vendors on challenges and opportunities under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and related regulatory initiatives. We have worked with banking and vendor clients over the years on regulatory and business aspects of payment systems, electronic funds transfers and deposit products. Recently, attorneys on the Team have served as regulatory and due diligence counsel in a number of complex corporate acquisition and sale transactions. 
 
We frequently work with Firm attorneys on the Privacy Team in privacy, information security and data sharing engagements for numerous of the Firm’s financial services and business clients. Team members work closely with the Firm’s Consumer Financial Services Litigation Team in litigation, enforcement and other dispute resolution matters. Our practice includes defense of numerous mortgage lending and lending practice class action and individual lawsuits, running the gamut from loan origination, loan sales, servicing and foreclosure. In addition, Team members are called on to advise and represent national trade groups and industry organizations in the banking and consumer financial services sector. 

Investigation and Enforcement

You have just been served with a subpoena by a State Attorney General’s office, Banking Secretary or Commissioner or the new Dodd-Frank created Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. What is being sought? Who is leading the investigation? Why have they targeted your company? Is there an agenda and, if so, what do they really want? The answers to these questions and what you do next could be critical to your company, its exposure and the ultimate outcome.
 
Consumer finance investigations are almost never initiated at an opportune moment and often the outcomes are unpredictable and the penalties and exposure are high. The landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act will greatly increase federal regulation of the consumer financial services industry. While the full details of the Dodd-Frank Act, including how the newly created Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection will operate, remain unsettled, what is certain is that banks and other lenders have never been under greater scrutiny and that the scrutiny will emanate from both federal regulators and States Attorneys General.
 
Womble Carlyle has been at the forefront of major financial industry investigations and related regulatory disputes for many years. Our lawyers are thought leaders  who help shape regulatory and enforcement policy. We have relationships with the leading watchdogs and know how to keep them honest. All types of financial industry participants—banks, mortgage brokers, lenders, credit card companies, deferred deposit companies and others—are turning to Womble Carlyle for legal guidance in this evolving field.
 
Sometimes formal investigations can be avoided. Our relationships and experience are invaluable in that regard. However, should your company become a target, we can assist in:
  • Working to understand your concerns and goals on the front end
  • Negotiating limitations in the scope of the subpoena and investigation
  • Maximizing confidentiality and exploit any opportunity for quick resolution
  • Insuring that investigators act within their authority
  • Preparing responses
  • Gathering, analyzing and managing relevant documents
  • Evaluating problem documents and areas of exposure
  • Defending consumer financial institutions in investigation and enforcement proceedings
Today’s technology and easy electronic communication tools have resulted in an environment in which a formal investigation of any significant scope will result in gathering and review of a seemingly unmanageable volume of documents. Womble Carlyle’s Case Management Facility has decades of experience in providing cost-effective document management solutions for clients involved in large-scale investigations and litigation.