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.

  • 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.
 
Financial services clients are turning to Womble Carlyle for guidance in foreclosure practices investigations and litigation. We focus our efforts on mitigating risks and controlling costs. Should you wish to discuss how we may help your business, please contact one of the lawyers listed to the right.